I’m seeing inconsistent Spotlight behavior on macOS 26 Tahoe.
In System Settings → Spotlight, I have:
Apps: enabled Files: disabled Folders: disabled
Despite this, Spotlight still shows regular files from many locations, including application support folders and user Library containers.
Examples:
/Applications/Adobe After Effects 2026/Presets/Image - Special Effects/Night Vision.ffx
/Applications/Utilities/Adobe Creative Cloud/Components/CCLibs/resources/designLibraries/main.js.map
/Users/<username>/Library/Containers/com.docker.docker/Data/log/vm/kmsg.log.0
I also added:
/Applications/Adobe After Effects 2026/Presets
to Spotlight → Search Privacy, but Spotlight continued to show:
Night Vision.ffx
in the Spotlight UI.
This is reproducible with mdfind as well:
mdfind 'kMDItemFSName == "Night Vision.ffx"c'
returns:
/Applications/Adobe After Effects 2026/Presets/Image - Special Effects/Night Vision.ffx
I rebuilt the Spotlight index with:
sudo mdutil -i off / sudo mdutil -X / sudo mdutil -i on / sudo mdutil -E /
but the behavior persisted.
I also encountered a separate but likely related issue where installed applications were temporarily missing from Spotlight search. For example, Visual Studio Code existed at:
/Applications/Visual Studio Code.app
and its Info.plist contained the correct bundle identifier:
com.microsoft.VSCode
but initially:
mdls "/Applications/Visual Studio Code.app"
returned:
could not find /Applications/Visual Studio Code.app
and:
mdfind 'kMDItemCFBundleIdentifier == "com.microsoft.VSCode"'
returned nothing.
However, test-importing the app worked correctly:
mdimport -t -d2 "/Applications/Visual Studio Code.app"
and showed valid metadata such as:
kMDItemCFBundleIdentifier = "com.microsoft.VSCode" kMDItemContentType = "com.apple.application-bundle" kMDItemDisplayName = "Visual Studio Code"
Restarting Spotlight-related services:
killall Spotlight killall corespotlightd sudo killall mds sudo killall mds_stores
caused application indexing to start working again.
After that, Visual Studio Code correctly appeared in:
mdfind 'kMDItemCFBundleIdentifier == "com.microsoft.VSCode"'
But the original problem remains: regular files still appear in Spotlight even though Files and Folders are disabled.
I also verified that adding:
com.apple.metadata:kMDItemSupportFileType = MDSystemFile
as an extended attribute to a file makes it disappear from the Spotlight UI, which suggests the files are being indexed and surfaced despite the UI exclusion settings.
Expected behavior:
When Files and Folders are disabled in Spotlight settings, Spotlight should only show applications and should not show arbitrary files such as .ffx, .js.map, logs, presets, or application-support files.
Also, files located inside a folder listed under Search Privacy should not appear in Spotlight results.
Actual behavior:
Spotlight continues to show these files, including files inside folders explicitly excluded by Search Privacy.
This appears to be either:
a regression in Spotlight result filtering on macOS 26 Tahoe, or a mismatch between the “Apps” category and application-related content indexing.
It would be useful to know whether this is a known issue.