Smart rule for items in trash

Hi,

is it possible to search for items in trash (to use the results in smart rules)?

Thanks
Chris

Items in the trash aren’t searchable. Why do you want to process items which will be most likely deleted anyway?

I would like to log items, when they were added to trash…

I can add another use case: I just wanted to empty the trash and got the question, whether I want to delete the indexed items, too. Well, I would like to see them first, and I started to build a smart group…

As an alternative approach I can look at the trash and sort by attribute “Path”. The imported (non-group) items presumably start with a ./.

A couple of those items were still in the Finder (and belong there), other items were no longer in the file system. So I wanted to manually deal with those items (move out from the trash since they are still valid files, hard-delete because they should be deleted). But I could not find a way to selectively manage the items in the trash.

Solution: don’t empty the trash :wink:

If I miss something, I welcome any hints.

There’s no need to build a smart group to identify indexed items in the Trash.

  1. Select the Trash.
  2. Choose Tools > Filter > Info.
  3. Set the File Location dropdown to Indexed. It will show only indexed items in the current location.
  4. You can also enable the Location column on the item list to view what database and group the items are in.
1 Like

Ha, I completely forgot that this (the filters) even existed. So not only did it help to solve my problem, but will probably help me in the future when I look for “stuff”. Thanks!

You’re welcome :slight_smile: