Rebuilding the Spotlight Index on iMac, OS Ventura 13.7.1

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Level 1

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Rebuilding the Spotlight Index on iMac, OS Ventura 13.7.1

About a month ago I noticed that Spotlight had stopped functioning completely. I contacted Apple Support and they guided me to this article.

I have followed the steps therein. However, neither the article nor Support gave me insight or answers to the following:

[Spotlight will reindex the contents of the disk or folder. This can take some time, depending on the amount of information being indexed.]

I want my documents and desktop reindexed. I have no idea what "some time" means. An hour, a few hours, overnight?

Also, there is nothing on the screen indicating any process occurring, so how could I know how much time the process might take?

It seems there should be some indicator of when the reindexing is finished.

Does anyone have any insights/suggestions/advice on this topic? Thank you.

#iMac #Spotlight #Ventura

iMac 27″ 5K, macOS 13.7

Posted on Nov 19, 2024 6:36 PM

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Answer 1

HWTech

Level 9

60,452 points

Nov 19, 2024 9:18 PM in response to Tatami53

How long reindexing will take depends on many factors such as the amount of data to be indexed, the speed of the storage device, the speed of the computer, and how busy the system is with other tasks just to name some of the things involved with guesstimating the time.

I did see a trick posted on this forum a while back on how to get an estimate on the Spotlight Indexing process, but I don't recall the exact details. I believe it involved clicking on the Spotlight icon. If Spotlight was indexing, then it would show the progress. Try clicking the Spotlight icon on the menubar. I'm not sure that was it though, but it was something like that.

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