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Search your notes on Mac
You can easily find the exact note you want—search for specific text, an emoji, a particular attachment, or use a suggested search. Top Hits is listed first in the results, and reflects notes with the best match (perhaps in the title), ones you’ve recently updated, and other factors.
You can search for specific text or even images inside your notes, notes in a specific account, or in a single note. Your search finds matching content in:
The body of each note
The filenames of attachments in your notes
PDF files that you’ve attached to your notes
Drawings you created on an iPhone, iPad, or iPod touch, and attached to your notes
Handwritten text in any notes
What’s inside the image you’re looking for (for example, “bike”)
Text in a scanned document inside one of your notes
Enter an image name or what’s contained in an image (such as car or cat) and your search finds matching attachments with that image.
In addition, you can use one of the suggested searches such as Shared Notes or Notes with Attachments to further refine the results.
Ask Siri. Say something like:
“Show me notes from today”
“Show me notes about vacation plans”
Search all notes
In the Notes app
on your Mac, do one of the following:
Search in a specific account: Click a folder in the account you want to search, click the magnifying glass
to show the search field, click the arrow
(next to the magnifying glass), then choose Current Account.
Search in all accounts: Click the magnifying glass
to show the search field, click the arrow
(next to the magnifying glass), then choose All Accounts.
Note: This step is only necessary if you have multiple accounts (such as iCloud and On My Mac accounts).
When Notes searches, it searches in the Recently Deleted folder of the specific account or All Accounts (as applicable).
If you want to begin your search with only a subset of your notes, click the magnifying glass
to show the search field and select one of the Suggested Searches.
To further refine your search, enter text in the search field, then press Return.
Type what you’re looking for the same way you’d say it (this is called natural language search).
Here are some examples of natural language search phrases:
“notes created last week”
“modified today”
“June from last year”
“with documents about remodel”
Notes that match your search are listed, along with the folder where each note is located. If you’ve locked a note, only the title is searched, even if your locked notes are unlocked.
If you want to find text within a specific note, click the body of the note to add an insertion point, then choose Edit > Find > Find (or press Command-F). Enter text in the search field that appears.
Search in the current note
In the Notes app
on your Mac, click a note in the notes list or double-click a note in gallery view.
Click the body of the note to add an insertion point, then choose Edit > Find > Find (or press Command-F).
Enter text in the search field that appears.
If you use upgraded iCloud notes or notes stored on your Mac, you can also browse your attachments by choosing View > Show Attachments Browser. See Attach photos, files, and more.
When you search with Spotlight, notes are included in the results.