Last Updated on November 30, 2019 by Christopher G Mendla
I am trying to go as paperless as possible. I have been saving receipts from the web as PDFs using PDF Creator.. I also have been scanning documents as PDFs and storing them. However, I have not been able to find them using windows search on my Win 7 64 bit system.
I came across an article on how to fix the PDF search issue.
The essence of the problem is that Windows 7/8 64 bit systems have a faulty PDF search filter.
The fix is to download the filter from Adobe and then re-index your search data. Keep in mind that if you have a lot of files reindexing can take a LOT of time. When you fix the filter issue, new PDFs will be searchable but old PDFs will not be searchable until they are reindexed
In order to fix the issue:
- Make sure you are running the 64 bit version of Windows 7/8
- Go to the control panel
- Choose small icons
- Find Indexing Options
- Click on advanced
- Click on File Types
- Scroll down to PDFs. If there is a filter issue, you will see an error indicated (registered iFilter is not found)
- Go to the adobe site to download the filter http://www.adobe.com/support/downloads/detail.jsp?ftpID=5542
- For some reason I could not download the filter using Chrome, I had to use Firefox.
- Install the filter.
- Check the Indexing options as indicated above.
- If you were successful, you will no longer see the error for PDFs.