I used to search for a video file using spotlight and it would return several results and when it was a file I accessed more than a couple of times it’d be the top result. I’d see an icon of the application used to play the media type and the name of the file.

Nowadays, with the same keyword, I frequently can’t find the file I successfully found before but also, even when it does find it, it doesn’t display it anywhere near the top results, it’s down in a section called ‘photos from apps’ which presents a grid of options, rather than a list, all of which represented by the VLC icon as it’s my default media player but with NO filename. I have found it before because usually it’s the one preselected, although not always. It’s super frustrating not being able to actually see what’s found. I think this is probably supposed to display photos as photographs or maybe videos using thumbnails, to make it easier finding an image compared to filenames given the name of the section ‘photos from apps’, but I’m not even looking for an image anyway and besides if I was and the thumbnails actually worked, I’d have to have typed the exact or at least similar filename to the image I’m looking for anyway making a visual search pretty useless.

To be clear, I’m not looking to get rid of the ability for spotlight to be able to search media such as videos or images, I just want the results of that search presented in the sane way they used to be back on High Sierra. (Probably persisted beyond that but I jumped from HS to Sonoma and now Sequoia).