Search inside Photoshop images with Spotlight

Do you create a lot of Photoshop images? I do – but many of my Photoshop documents have similar names, making it difficult to search by filename. Spotlight can help by searching inside of Photoshop documents. Here’s how.

I use Photoshop Elements but this works with any layered Photoshop document. Simply search for the name, or partial name, of any Layer inside your images.

For instance, I knew I had named a layer “brown twitter bird” inside the image I needed. So I performed a Spotlight search for “brown twitter bird” and Spotlight located the image named follow-mactoids-on-twitter.psd – which was exactly the image I sought.

So the next time you have trouble finding a layered Photoshop image, try searching for a Layer name instead of filename.