Spotlight and SD cards

8 Feb 2008 11:33:19

Trevor Hewson

To while away a lengthy power cut, I hit on the idea of plugging the SD card from our (mains operated) DAB radio into our MacBook. This worked well, although the MP2 files took a while to import into iTunes before we could listen to them.

However, having now put the card back into the radio, there are a couple of extra folders cluttering up the radio's menus. One is a Trash folder, probably created because I was rash enough to use the MacBook to delete the MP2 files we had listened to, but the other seems to relate to Spotlight, so I don't know what triggered the creation of that one.

The card still works okay in the radio but this makes me nervous about the practice of plugging other people's camera cards into my Mac in case the Mac adds extra files and folders that could confuse their camera. So, I have two questions:

i) Is there a way of stopping Spotlight from indexing external drives, especially cards? (Spotlight preferences seems to enable the exclusion of a drive or folder after it has been mounted, but that's not really good enough)

ii) Is it possible to remove these extra folders, including the trash folder, other than by re-formatting the card?

Trevor Hewson