Inside files and photos · Espresso Help

Pro · Inside files is part of Espresso Pro. It’s off until you turn it on.

Turn on Settings › Metadata › Inside files and Espresso reads, slowly in the background and entirely on your Mac:

Documents and code (Pour-over): search the words inside with content:invoice or content:"lease agreement".
Photos: what they show, with looks:dog or looks:spiaggia, and the text in them (receipts, signs, screenshots) with content:.

What’s read is kept for offline disks too. A file is read again only when it changes.

Searching inside

You type	Finds
`content:invoice`	documents, code and photos with the word “invoice” in them
`content:"lease agreement"`	the exact phrase
`looks:dog`, `looks:sunset`	photos showing a dog, a sunset
`looks:cane`, `looks:spiaggia`	labels are in English; common Italian words work too
`ext:pdf dm:lastyear content:iban`	combined with any filter

content: and looks: find the exact words: content:affitto doesn’t find a PDF that says “locazione”. To search by meaning, ask the barista: with Inside files on, it understands documents by their text and photos by what they show.

Every search, inside too

To look inside files with every search, without typing content:, turn on Search Inside Files in the search options (⌥⌘I). Each word then matches the name or the text inside the file.

What’s read


Documents	PDF, plain text and Markdown, Word (`.doc`, `.docx`), RTF, OpenDocument text, HTML, CSV and JSON, subtitles
Code	source files
Photos	JPEG, HEIC, PNG, TIFF, WebP, GIF and BMP, including the originals in your Photos library

Up to 32,000 characters are kept per document (the first 60 pages of a PDF). System folders, Library folders and caches are skipped, and so are hidden files and files over 200 MB (150 MB for photos).

Turning it off

Turn off Documents and code or Photos in Settings › Metadata › Inside files to stop reading them. The Photos switch is the same as Understand photos in Settings › Search › Ask the Barista.