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I am running Ubuntu GNOME 15.10 with GNOME 3.18, and I would like to know if I can do any of the following and if so how:

  • Make it so that a folder is not indexed but leave its contents indexable (so that if I search for that folder's name in my system nothing will come up, but if I search for its contents, that will come up)

  • Make it so that a folder is not indexable and nor is any of its contents (and if it contains sub-folders within it then it should recursively not allow any contents in them to be indexed nor the contents of any sub-sub-folders in the sub-folders etc, nor any of those sub-folders themselves)

  • Make it so that individual files in a folder are not indexable, though not having any impact on other contents nor the parent-folder

So, are any of these variants possible? I believe the indexing program is called Tracker which indexes files and folders and their contents and allows for one to search for them on the system.

2 Answers2

9

By default folders with a .trackerignore file are ignored, so it should be enough to do:

touch .trackerignore

in the folder you don't want to be indexed, or create the .trackerignore file using your file manager.

BeastOfCaerbannog
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memeplex
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9

In Ubuntu GNOME 16.04 with GNOME 3.20 there is now such an application called Search and Indexing (or tracker-gui) installed by default (if it is not installed or if you are running a previous version which does not have it pre-installed then it can be installed by running sudo apt-get install tracker-gui) which one can use to highly flexibly change the indexing settings with (I have blacked out some personal information in one of the screenshots):

Indexing tab

Locations tab

Ignored Content tab

Control tab

System

As can be seen from the above screenshots this covers most of the points in the question.

Fabby
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