How to stop a file or folder from being indexed in GNOME?

Question

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.

Solution

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.

Comments

[Admin]

I didn't update Ubuntu 16.04 to GNOME 3.20 (so I got GNOME 3.18). I didn't find tracker-preferences But I solved installing tracker-gui You get the preferences as well. I hope it could help.

[Admin]

The solutions below are for Ubuntu 16.04. Any solutions for Ubuntu 18.04?

[Admin]

That's probably just the manual way of doing what the GUI does in the backend though,

[Admin]

Seems 16.04 was the last version with tracker-gui on official repos. Do you know of any alternative?

[Admin]

I'm also looking for an 18.04 alternative

[Jack Wasey]

dconf read /org/freedesktop/tracker/miner/files/ignored-directories-wit‌​h-content

[Jack Wasey]

dconf read /org/freedesktop/tracker/miner/files/ignored-directories

[Admin]

Any alternative for 18.04?

[becko]

Can anyone confirm if this works in Ubuntu 18.04