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How to Disable and Re-Enable Spotlight Indexing on Your Mac

How to Disable and Re-Enable Spotlight Indexing on Your Mac

Posted May 16, 2015 at 7:48pm by iClarified
These are instructions on how to disable and re-enable Spotlight indexing on Mac OS X Yosemite, Mavericks, Mountain Lion, and Lion.

How to Disable and Re-Enable Spotlight Indexing on Your Mac

Disable Spotlight
Launch Terminal from the Applications:Utilities folder.
How to Disable and Re-Enable Spotlight Indexing on Your Mac


Input the following command into the Terminal window and press Return.

sudo launchctl unload -w /System/Library/LaunchDaemons/com.apple.metadata.mds.plist
How to Disable and Re-Enable Spotlight Indexing on Your Mac

Enter your administrative password when prompted.
How to Disable and Re-Enable Spotlight Indexing on Your Mac

Notice Spotlight no longer functions as it did.
How to Disable and Re-Enable Spotlight Indexing on Your Mac


Enable Spotlight
To re-enable spotlight simply enter the following command into the Terminal window.

sudo launchctl load -w /System/Library/LaunchDaemons/com.apple.metadata.mds.plist
How to Disable and Re-Enable Spotlight Indexing on Your Mac

Spotlight will begin indexing again and the feature will work as it did before.
How to Disable and Re-Enable Spotlight Indexing on Your Mac

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Comments (8)
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A.Torres
A.Torres - February 20, 2017 at 9:16pm
Thanks from Brazil !!
M_Square
M_Square - June 3, 2016 at 2:32am
This helped a lot. I have been trying off and on for weeks to re-enable my Spotlight and this was the only one to work. Thank you.
zaknafindel
zaknafindel - March 8, 2016 at 4:28pm
Yes! This worked for me, many thanks
MikeM
MikeM - May 17, 2015 at 4:28pm
You don't need terminal to reindex: https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT201716
gamerscul9870
gamerscul9870 - May 17, 2015 at 12:26pm
Who would want to disable a clever feature?
sparrowhawk544
sparrowhawk544 - April 25, 2016 at 3:46pm
You may want to disable Spotlight as it can run amok if when indexing. For example, I edit a lot of video and regularly have different drives attached to my Mac. A RAID array, a few drives I have shot from, and maybe a USB thumb drive for output. I will also have Final Cut Pro open and potentially Parallels open as well. The computer will often become slow to the point where it is unusable. I fired up Activity Monitor and saw 15 or so instances of mdworker. The Mac was trying to index multiple drives while I was already doing heavy CPU intensive activities. I killed Spotlight (which I don't use anyway) and the system is fast and happy again. Anyway, that is one reason why you may want to turn it off.
Smattie
Smattie - May 17, 2015 at 6:17am
Nice documentation ;)
Smattie
Smattie - May 17, 2015 at 6:17am
Nice documentation ;)
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