Fast Search Server iFilters for Tiffs and PDFs

Yesterday I wrote about setting up the Tiff iFilter on SharePoint Server 2010. Today I tried to apply this same approach to my 2010 FAST Search Server but hit a few bumps along the way. Several Bing searches lead me to someone talking about how both Tiff and PDF should work out of the box. I uploaded several document of both types, re-crawled and never got back any full text search results. I enabled the advanced filter pack, but still no luck. I did eventually get it working though and here is how I did it.

First I added the feature mentioned in the previous post for the Windows Tiff iFilter on the Fast Server.

Now that the feature is installed it will need to be registered. To register a iFilter for Fast server go to the formatdetector directory and edit the user_converter-rules.xml file.

I followed this article by Microsoft to register the tiff iFilter as a custom iFilter. I used this list by w3schools to get the mimetype reference needed to build my xml configuration.

After making your changes to the file make sure you keep a backup. If you ever install a Fast\SharePoint update or Service pack this file will be overwritten. This file is not backed up via the normal Fast\SharePoint backup procedures.

If you only care about Tiffs then you can run this power shell command (psctrl reset) on the Fast server and then re-crawl to get your full text search results.

To add PDF support download the latest PDF iFilter from adobe. At the time of this article it was this. Install the PDF iFilter on the Fast Server. Run the power shell command show above and then re-crawl all your content.

Now all PDF and Tiff documents should return full text search results.