Whenever I try to search for example, videos ending with .mp4 extensions (I have a lot of these kind of files), I got no results while the file indexer (balooctl6) is enabled.
The file indexer is set to only index my /home folder, and nothing else, hidden files are excluded and its set to only index file names but not its contents.
So, these example video files are on my external drives. Now - when I type .mp4 in the search field, I get no results. And here’s the twist: when I disable the file indexing, then I get results. But my problem however is that keeping the file indexer disabled, screws up the search results when I search within my actual indexed /home folder, because it gives back results from system files too, so it’s like a never ending circle of doom.
I already purged the database via balooctl6 purge. I’ve read that balooctl is insanely unstable, now I see what people mean by that.
Is there a proper solution to keep the indexing on, but still be able to search on external drives without indexing them?
I also tried to exclude my external drives (even though as I mentioned earlier that I explicitly set that to only index my /home), just to see if its a bug or not, but nope, I get no search results from my external drive.
I open dolphin, go to the folder where I want to search within, then I press CTRL+F to open up the search box up the top of the Dolphin’s address bar. Then I just type in for example .mp4 or .jpg and hit Enter.
Get no results. Turned off file indexing, typed in the same exact words, I get results. I thought it must have been something with my regex keywording, but then I tried to look for file names also, like mypicture.jpg and only typed in mypicture - same symptoms, no results. Turned off baloo, mypicture.jpg showed up.
Thanks mate, but the problem is that it doesn’t go into subfolder, only searches within the actual current folder. I’m a datahoarder, see my situation as having 3TB of files, while having huge directory trees. I can’t go within each of them one by one But thanks for the reply though
Out of curiosity, can you send me back what this gives you back, just to isolate: systemctl --user status kde-baloo and systemctl --user status plasma-baloorunner.service
While you work on finding a fix, I’ll offer an alternate tool — XnViewMP. It’s meant for media, but you can turn off thumbnails, playback, etc. and use it like a regular file manager.
I recommend it because it has a feature which allows you to view all the contents in all subdirectories of a folder, which you can then filter in the same way I described for dolphin above.
But thanks for the reply though
