Alfred Hat Tips

We try to make Alfred results as relevant to you as possible and giving you many ways to control what shows up and what doesn’t show up when you search using Alfred.

Here’s a little overview of the different ways you can exclude files and folders that you definitely don’t want in Alfred’s results: 

• Default Results - make sure you define your search scope around the paths that you need most often in your searches and also select which types of results show or don’t show in the top section of the Default Results preferences
• File Search Exclusions & Scope - again, you can decide which types of results show up when you use the “find” or “open” keywords under Preferences > Features > File Search
• Spotlight Privacy tab - Alfred respects Spotlight privacy settings so if you want to exclude certain folders or files from Alfred’s (as well as Spotlight’s search results), add these to the Spotlight Privacy tab as shown in this video [note: if you’ve added things to your Spotlight Privacy and they’re still showing up in Alfred, type “reload” into the Alfred window and hit return]
• “Alfred:ignore” Spotlight comment - use this if you want to exclude your file only from Alfred’s results (and not from Spotlight’s) - this will only work for specific files and not for folders (as it won’t exclude the contents of the folders you add this comment to)

Every little helps. It can be the seconds/minutes that you save during the day and whose accumulation ultimately saves you precious time and productivity. So why not make use of Alfred even for little tasks?

Let’s take the example of tracking packages. With Alfred you can set up a custom search for the providers that you use most often. Then you’d be able to just quickly type your keyword, eg. “pt” followed by your tracking number inside Alfred. Voila!

Set up your custom searches for your favourite providers or have a look around to see if someone else have come up with them already, here are two to get you started:

• Track UPS Shipment
• Track packages on Packagetrackr.com

You can find many more custom searches on the Alfred Tips site :).