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

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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.

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

sudo launchctl unload -w /System/Library/LaunchDaemons/com.apple.metadata.mds.plist

Enter your administrative password when prompted.

Notice Spotlight no longer functions as it did.

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

Spotlight will begin indexing again and the feature will work as it did before.

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A.Torres - February 20, 2017 at 9:16pm

Thanks from Brazil !!

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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 - March 8, 2016 at 4:28pm

Yes! This worked for me, many thanks

MikeM - May 17, 2015 at 4:28pm

You don't need terminal to reindex: https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT201716

gamerscul9870 - May 17, 2015 at 12:26pm

Who would want to disable a clever feature?

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 - May 17, 2015 at 6:17am

Nice documentation ;)