Quote:
Originally Posted by tomoe
Dumb question: what exactly do the importers do?
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An mdimporter, short for metadata importer, tells Spotlight how to deal with a certain file format (or several). For instance, Microsoft Office.mdimporter contains code that analyzes Word, Excel, and PowerPoint(?) files, which Spotlight then indexes, so you can search those file's contents. For plain text files, this is trivial, for a complex format like Excel, the mdimporter gives hints which portions of the file are worth indexing (and how to access them), and as a more special case, for a image files like say a JPEG, the mdimporter focuses on information such as the dimensions and other metadata (e.g.: when was the image taken? with what sort of camera model?).
Worst thing to happen with a mdimporter missing: Spotlight won't be able search within files of that type.