Ziplight: Spotlight for Zip Files

Originally downloaded April 3, 2006. Ziplight is a free plug-in for Apple’s Spotlight search system, which allows Spotlight to index the contents of Zip files. It can’t index the full-text contents of those files, but just knowing the files’ meta-info will be more than helpful.

Update 2/19/07. As much as I wanted it to be true, I so far have been unable to get Ziplight to demonstrate that it’s actually working. I put copies of a large zip file in various places on my file system, all accessible to Spotlight, and therefore Ziplight. The zip file contained hundreds of documents, among them a unique PDF file I used for tracking. After weeks of checking, I still can’t find that PDF file through Spotlight. I’ve been in touch with the developer and sent them info and log data. Perhaps it’s something simple, such as a misconfiguration. For now, I’m counting Ziplight out for the punch and removing it from my system.

Version as tested: 1.1.2.