A "possible" fix for Media Bay Weirdness on OSX

If you’re having odd experiences with Media bay on OSX, especially after moving from an old machine to a new one, I came across something that fixed my issues. YMMV.

After migrating to a new M2Pro Mini, I noticed that my media bay wasn’t populating all the content I’ve collected over the years kept on an permanently connected external disk.

After trying to search for a file I knew on was on the disk via the finder, I realized that Spotlight hadn’t indexed it. The usual “adding and removing the drive from the Privacy/spotlight panel” didn’t do anything, and even trying to force spotlight indexing via the terminal returned the strange error :

% sudo mdutil -i on /Volumes/Assets

/System/Volumes/Data/Volumes/Assets:

Indexing and searching disabled.

Eventually I did a “ls -a” command (list everything on the disk including hidden files)on the disk and discovered an odd hidden file called

.metadata_never_index_unless_rootfs

I’ve never come across that file. Turns out thats how OSX used to allow granular control of spotlight indexing (so you could not index a folder or file. They no longer use this and some are complaining about the lack of this control. Don’t know. Never used it)

After some googling I removed the file and my media bay now works the way it did on my old machine. And results are findable via spotlight.

So if nothing else, it’s worth a shot to see if you have that hidden file.

Before doing anything destructive on your computer via the terminal, the usual caveats apply: make sure you have a recent and tested backup, go slow, double check what you’ve typed before hitting that return key, no guarantees, offer void where prohibited my law, not suitable for children.

What’s especially odd is that I’ve never used spotlight like this - I’ve never disabled any kind of limitations on indexing on any machine I’ve ever owned so I have no idea where this file came from but it seemed to effect behaviour on OS 14.6.1

Duh - an easier way to see hidden files on a Mac is to go to the top of your disk, type

Command + shift + . “the period key”