How to Perform a Full-Text Search of Illustrator Files (.ai) Using Spotlight

Forum|Forum|2 days ago
September 8, 2026
6 replies
52 views

Spotlight is a high-speed search feature built into macOS. For example, with PDF files, when a search keyword is entered, Spotlight incrementally finds files containing that string within their contents and displays them in a list.

However, with Illustrator files (.ai), Spotlight cannot detect text within the file, making it difficult to find the desired file.

One workaround is to enable Create PDF Compatible File when saving and change the file extension to .pdf, which allows for full-text search as with a PDF. However, I’d like to achieve this without having to do that every time, while keeping the .ai extension. Is there a way to do this?

Note: Adding the target UTI `com.adobe.illustrator.ai-image` to PDF.mdimporter’s Info.plist does not work.

Dave Creamer of IDEAS

Community Expert

Until this issue is resolved (if ever), you could try saving it as PDF including Illustrator editing. I name these files like this example so I can remember what PDFs are from Illustrator:

MyFileName_nAI.pdf

nAI = native Adobe Illustrator (I used to use AI until that got highjacked...)

David Creamer: Community Expert (ACI and ACE 1995-2023)

S

sttk3Author

Legend

Thank you for your suggestion. Preparing a searchable PDF is definitely an easy solution. Although it's something to avoid if possible.

A friend successfully prototyped “mdimporter,” a plugin that extracts text from Illustrator files to make it searchable, so I’ll test it to see if it can be refined for actual use.

Ton Frederiks

Community Expert

@sttk3 PDF is searchable, but Illustrator files are not (since long) on a Mac.

In this old post an app named Alfred was suggested by Kurt Gold. I don’t have experience with it, but it may be worth trying:

S

sttk3Author

Legend

Thanks for the info. After looking into it, it seems that even Alfred has to refer to Spotlight’s data to search the contents of files. This approach ran into the same issue.

creative explorer

Community Expert

@sttk3 that’s an interesting take on using enable Create PDF Compatible File when saving and change the file extension to .pdf; I feel like Apple needs Adobe or maybe it’s Adobe needs Apple to work together in making Spotlight work cohesively with Adobe files

m

S

sttk3Author

Legend

Indeed. The best-case scenario would be for Apple to include Illustrator files (.ai) in PDF.mdimporter, or for Adobe to provide an mdimporter for Illustrator files. It would be quite happy if that happened.

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