Spotlight not showing emails or photos

[Rub3n NL]

In El Capitan it should be possible to use natural language to find e-mails and foto's, but search queries do not return results. Not a single foto or email shows up when asked for.
In system preference all search options are checked. The mail and fotos app do show up, but not their content. Correct me if im wrong but it should be possible to get results when asking for "fotos from last month" or "e-mails from ... "
Anyone any ideas about why this is happening and how to solve it? Much appreciated.

Update: made sure spotlight was re-indexed. Now it does find emails; but still no photos showing up. Help still much appreciated!

 

[ed.]

Hi, if you can, try this: connect to the internet through a cellular connection (hotspot through a cellphone), and test if spotlight suggestions work. I have the same problem on my iMac and that solves it. Strangely enough I also have a macbook that works fine on wifi, so my connection should not be the problem.

 

[Rub3n NL]

Thanks for the reply! Why would i need an internet connection if i'm searching for local files/photos?
Gonna give it a go anyway, and see if it works. I'll let you know. Thanks again.

update: tried your suggestion, still no photo results, thanks though!

 

[ed.]

Hey, thanks for trying it out! I'm guessing the connection is needed because the natural language searches (such as 'photos from last week') are not processed locally but sent to apple and processed there. Did you try anything else? A good test is to check for a wikipedia entry like a monument and see if it shows up on wifi and on cellular as well: for me it works on both on the laptop but on the imac it only works if I'm on cellular.
Also, your cellular connection needs to be fast: my first try was in a spot with poor connection and it didn't give results, but when I moved the phone to a spot with better coverage suddenly the queries for weather and wikipedia started to appear.

 

[Rub3n NL]

Hey, thanks for trying it out! I'm guessing the connection is needed because the natural language searches (such as 'photos from last week') are not processed locally but sent to apple and processed there. Did you try anything else? A good test is to check for a wikipedia entry like a monument and see if it shows up on wifi and on cellular as well: for me it works on both on the laptop but on the imac it only works if I'm on cellular.
Also, your cellular connection needs to be fast: my first try was in a spot with poor connection and it didn't give results, but when I moved the phone to a spot with better coverage suddenly the queries for weather and wikipedia started to appear.

Ah right.. That makes sense... Didn't think of that...

Connection does not seem to be the issue. I'm on 120mb ethernet and a 4g hotspot with full service.

The whole natural language thing may not work because i'm on a dutch version?

 

[ed.]

dutch should be supported. I've just discovered that in my case the problem was my ISP somehow filtering the requests to apple's servers (or something), so I've added google DNS's both on my mac and on my iphone (they are 8.8.8.8 and 8.8.4.4) and now I get the spotlight suggestions! Maybe you can try that too?

 

[ed.]

by the way, I still don't get results for photos on the phone or mac, so that might be buggy for real.

 

[Rub3n NL]

I tried 8.8.8.8 and the other DNS, does not make much of difference. It does show weather and sports results for example. It does show emails. But emails from last week, gives me no mails from last week but some random mails from 2006 or something. And don't get me started about the photos... I think it may be buggy as hell... unfortunately...