Search ZIP files with Spotlight

Ziplight can be a godsend if you work often with ZIP files.

This little plugin works perfectly with Spotlight, allowing the Mac search function to look within ZIP files to find archives, whether these be documents, photos, videos or anything else. That way, you won’t have to unzip every compressed file you receive just to verify what is in it. To note though, Ziplight doesn’t exactly search the contents of a Zip file but only looks for the name of files. You’ll still have to know more or less what you’re looking for in the compressed file.

The real strength of the plugin is how it makes use of the speed and reliability of Spotlight, which can quickly find any file and learn from the queries you make. Once you’ve installed it you’ll have forgotten it’s there and finding files in a Zip archive will be a breeze. It does make you wonder if Apple will include this functionality in future updates to Spotlight though.

Ziplight is a useful little plugin that allows Spotlight to look for the names of files inside of Zip files.

Mac OS X natively supports the zip file archive format, commonly used to compress and distribute files. This useful feature would be even more useful if you could use Spotlight to find files within these archives. The Ziplight Spotlight importer plugin lets you do just that. Just install this importer on your computer and start searching!

Spotlight importers have to be fast and efficient, just like Spotlight itself. For this reason, Ziplight will not search the contents of the files within an archive (as this would require it to unzip every archive on your system). Ziplight will only search the names of the files within a zip archive. Mac OS X 10.4 (Tiger) is required to use Spotlight plugins.