Table of Contents       5. Find


5.2 The Find Editor

The full power of the search options in NeoFinder only comes to life with the Find Editor. Simply hit the Find Editor button in the toolbar to open it:




The top menu allows you to switch between "All the following are true", which is the logic AND, as well as the "Any of the following…", which equals the logical OR.

Then, select the catalogs you wish to search in the second menu. Either all of them, or just a couple of catalogs that you can specify here, or catalogs of a specific label.

You can use the
Spotlight search by selecting the Spotlight button.


Then you can add up to 16 different criteria to your search.


Every row in the Find Editor has three sections.
The first is a menu on the left. This contains the type of value you are looking for. In this case, the "Name" of an item.
The
second is another menu where you tell NeoFinder the type of match you want.
The
third part is usually a text field, where you can type the value you want to be found.

Most of the Find types are very obvious, like the "Name" searches the names of all items, the "Comment" for the comment, if any, while the "Size" checks the size of files and folders. The "Duration" is a little bit more interesting, as it checks the duration of any type of audio track. This currently contains MP3, AAC, AIFF, and WAV files, and movies as well.

One particular powerful Find type is "Any Text". This will ask NeoFinder not only to search the name and comment of any item, but also any other textual fields that the item may contain in the NeoFinder catalog. This includes fields like artist, composer, genre, comments, but also all EXIF and IPTC text fields.

Another useful addition to the Find parameters is the Path type. That allows you to search for all items contained in a folder with a certain name, and all its subfolders.

To Find files or folders that were created or modified at a specific date, or a date range, use the "Creation date" and "Modification date" types. These will bring a date input section to the right of the parameter line,. To change either the day, the month, or the year, simply click into the value you wish to change, and use the appearing arrow buttons to change it. It will look like this:






Regular Expressions
An immensely powerful option is the use of "regex" or
regular expressions in some of the Find parameters. This allows you to extend the search options by almost any way you can imagine.

For example, if you want to find just folders which contain either the name "2010", or the name "2020", or both, you can use this setup:

Regular Expression exmaple for the Find Editor in NeoFinder


The search text is (2010|2020). The different possible values, which can also be more than two, of course, are separated by the vertical bar "|". You can type it with Alt-7 on some keyboards. The brackets () only make it easier to read and expand later.

Another example is a way to find different spellings:

If you need to find folders that contain either the string "grey" or "grey", you can use this term:

search for different spellings with regular expressions




Find Resolutions
Use the
Resolution parameter to quickly search for photo and video pixel sizes. Multiple pre-defined options include HD, UHD, and many megapixel values.

resolution find editor menu


You can also specify if you wish to find files with exactly these measurements, or at least or at most. Combined with the
Kind parameter, this allows you to find exactly the type and size of files you need.

Find Editor more Resolution params