---
title: Introduction to Spotlight
framework: carbon
role: article
path: apple-archive/documentation/Carbon/Conceptual/MetadataIntro
---

# Introduction to Spotlight

Introduces the main components and services of Apple

## Who Should Read This Document

Spotlight is a fundamental feature of OS X, and all developers should be familiar with its capabilities. Developers of applications that save documents to disk should consider providing Spotlight support by implementing a metadata importer.

**Important:** Spotlight metadata is available to applications running OS X version 10.4 and later.

## Organization of This Document

The following articles cover key concepts in understanding how Spotlight works:

- [What is Spotlight?](Concepts/WhatIsSpotlight.html#//apple_ref/doc/uid/TP40001281-CJBEJBHH) provides an overview of what Spotlight provides. - [How Does Spotlight Work?](Concepts/HowDoesItWork.html#//apple_ref/doc/uid/TP40001847-CJBEJBHH) describes how Spotlight creates metadata indexes, and how they are queried. - [Spotlight Metadata Attributes](Concepts/SpotlightAttrs.html#//apple_ref/doc/uid/TP40001851-CJBEJBHH) provides an overview of metadata attributes. - [Security and Privacy Considerations](Concepts/SecurityAndPrivacy.html#//apple_ref/doc/uid/TP40001852-CJBEJBHH) describes how Spotlight addresses security and privacy issues. - [Spotlight and Document Bundles](Concepts/DocumentBundles.html#//apple_ref/doc/uid/TP40002007-CJBEJBHH) describes how an application should create document bundles with Spotlight in mind.

## See Also

There are other technologies, not fully covered in this document, that are fundamental to integrating Spotlight into your applications. Refer to these documents for more details:

- *[File Metadata Search Programming Guide](../SpotlightQuery/Concepts/Introduction.html#//apple_ref/doc/uid/TP40001841)* describe how to query Spotlight from your applications. - *[Spotlight Importer Programming Guide](../MDImporters/MDImporters.html#//apple_ref/doc/uid/TP40001267)* describe the plug-ins that extract metadata from document files. - *[File Metadata Attributes Reference](../../../CoreServices/Reference/MetadataAttributesRef/MetadataAttrRef.html#//apple_ref/doc/uid/TP40001689)* describe the metadata attributes provided by Apple. - *[Core Data Spotlight Integration Programming Guide](../../../Cocoa/Conceptual/SpotlightCoreData/Introduction/introSpotlightCoreData.html#//apple_ref/doc/uid/TP40008065)* discusses how to take advantage of Spotlight features in an app that uses Core Data for document storage.

[Next](Concepts/WhatIsSpotlight.html)

Copyright © 2004, 2013 Apple Inc. All Rights Reserved. [Terms of Use](http://www.apple.com/legal/internet-services/terms/site.html) | [Privacy Policy](http://www.apple.com/privacy/) | Updated: 2013-08-08