In a separate workflow, I do the same thing for documents (text and folders) in a Scrivener project.
Metadata for files on a hard drive (Mack) are the name, file extension, application icon, and items in the list at right. Checked fields in the list at right are the ones that show up as column names (and Name).
Those are the commonly used metadata fields, but MANY others can be used in customized searches.
If you do a search on the Mac, it starts with putting something in the search box. I used “.app” in the next image and specified that I wanted it to appear in the NAME, not in the text. It doesn’t do the search until I press enter, so you don’t see apps yet.
Now you see apps, and I’ve shown what happens when you right-click in the bar. You can check any of these to make it a column name … just as you can for metadata in Scrivener’s outline view.
Now click on the + sign indicated in the previous image to see dropdown list boxes for searching on more criteria.
Now click on “Name” in the dummy criterion to see choices you can make. Most are hidden under “Other”.
You can experiment with the short list (or longer, hidden list) and discover POWERFUL search options. Here’s a part of the “Other…” list. Checking an item puts it in the first dropdown of a new criterion. Then you click on the 2nd dropdown to set values for the search on that criterion. Here I selected “Is Application Managed” and clicked the checkbox.
Here we see the 2nd dropdown for that field. (Using “Any” would make this criterion do nothing.)
That’s it for now. As you can see, search is extremely powerful on the Mac.