Mac OS X Spotlight: how to stop it from indexing SD cards

I tried the approach in How do I tell Spotlight not to index a particular folder? but it still indexes my SD card when I reinsert it into my card reader.

How do I stop this, either for all SD cards or for a particular one?

edit: It looks like I can do this either with that method or with mdutil, but I also need to delete all the hidden dotfiles (.Spotlight-V100 .Trashes ._.Trashes and .fseventsd) from the SD card -- this is for my Garmin GPS and the GPS somehow doesn't like the dotfiles.

When I delete those dotfiles, Mac OS X forgets that I have disabled Spotlight on the card.

Jason S

Posted 2010-06-26T20:22:38.690

Reputation: 5 983

possible duplicate of How disable mac snow leopard creating .Spotlight-V100 and .Trash folders in USB Flash Drivers?

– kenorb – 2015-04-08T11:07:23.607

Answers

See this site for the simple answer: create a file named .metadata_never_index in the root of the volume (once it is mounted).

Henno

Posted 2010-06-26T20:22:38.690

Reputation: 639

I believe he doesn't want any dotfiles on the external drive. – ghoppe – 2010-06-28T21:16:20.897

Maybe one empty dotfile is better than several non-empty ones? The files he mentions are non-empty... – Henno – 2010-06-29T04:47:16.213

Maybe. Couldn't hurt to try I suppose :) – ghoppe – 2010-06-29T16:03:33.163

I'm not sure how to deal with the issue... it's a moot point (for now) since I reformatted the card on a PC and haven't touched it with my Mac. – Jason S – 2010-07-07T20:48:12.587

Hmmm. This answer only prevents the .Spotlight-V100 directory, not the other dotfiles (.fseventsd, .Trashes ._.Trashes). – Jason S – 2010-07-17T13:03:01.510

As far as I know, there is no easy way to do this. But there is a utility that can prevent these files from being written called Blue Harvest.

Edit: Here is a free solution called Hidden Cleaner.

ghoppe

Posted 2010-06-26T20:22:38.690

Reputation: 6 124