iPhoto 6 and Spotlight – fixed

For those of you still stuck with iPhoto 6, I discovered how to enable Spotlight to properly index iPhotos including keywords, titles and other details.

I am not sure if this applies to every iPhoto 6 user, but in my iPhoto 6 application Apple forgot to tell Spotlight what to look for. Follow these steps to fix this:

1. Open /Applications, right/ctrl-click iPhoto and select “Show Package Contents”.
2. In the new window find Contents/Info.plist.
3. Open TextEdit and drag the Info.plist file onto the TextEdit Dock-icon to open it.
4. At the end of the file, just before “</dict></plist>”, insert the following code:

<key>UTExportedTypeDeclarations</key>
<array>
<dict>
<key>UTTypeConformsTo</key>
<array>
<string>public.data</string>
</array>
<key>UTTypeDescription</key>
<string>iPhoto Spotlight file</string>
<key>UTTypeIdentifier</key>
<string>com.apple.iPhoto.ipspot</string>
<key>UTTypeTagSpecification</key>
<dict>
<key>public.filename-extension</key>
<string>ipspot</string>
</dict>
</dict>
</array>


Finally, save the file as plain-text file and make sure the file ending is not hidden and the full name is “Info.plist”. Then wait for Spotlight to do its magic.

You may have to delete the iPhoto.ipspot file in your iPhoto Library folder and open iPhoto to trigger the update.

UPDATE: Someone reported that their iPhoto stopped working after they edited the file. Another option is to replace your Info.plist in the iPhoto package with this file. Always make sure you have a backup of your original file.