Finding specific things

Finding a PDF you cannot name

Updated 2026-07-31 · 4 min read

PDFs are the files people lose most, because they arrive from elsewhere with names somebody else chose.

If you remember roughly when

Date beats name for received documents. ⌘F in Finder → + → Date Added → within last → 3 months, plus Kind → PDF. Sort by date and scan.

If you remember what it says

Spotlight searches PDF text where a text layer exists:

mdfind -onlyin ~ "policy number"

This fails on scans, which are images. Check whether a specific file has text:

mdimport -d2 -t ~/Downloads/scan.pdf | head -40

No text means no content search until it has been through OCR.

If it came by email

It is probably not in Downloads at all — attachments open from Mail's container inside ~/Library, which Spotlight will not return. Search Mail itself (⌥⌘F), or:

find ~/Library -iname "*.pdf" -mtime -30 2>/dev/null

If it is on a drive you have unplugged

macOS cannot search it. Either plug it in, or use a tool that keeps unmounted volumes in its index.

The pragmatic order

1. Browser download history, if it came from a website
2. Finder search by date + Kind, sorted newest first
3. Mail search, if it was sent to you
4. find ~/Library for the container folders
5. Content search, which only works on real text PDFs

Common questions

Can macOS search inside scanned PDFs?

Not without OCR. Preview can add a text layer on recent macOS versions; most PDF apps offer it too.

Why can I not find a PDF an app created?

Sandboxed apps write into their container under ~/Library, which Spotlight excludes.