11 Smart Folders To Make You More Productive On Your Mac

hi this is Gary with macmost.com here are some uses for smart folders on your Mac [Music] most is brought two things to a great group and more than a thousand supporters go to macmost.com patreon there you could read more about the patreon campaign join us and get exclusive content and course discounts so smart folders are a way to set up something that looks like a folder but it's actually conducting a search every time you view it in fact these are also called saved searches to create a smart folder in the finder go to file and then new smart folder and then it looks like you're doing a search but the difference will be that when you're done you can hit the save button and then that turns that into a saved search or smart folder that you can go to again and again and it updates automatically so like with the search you're going to start off by deciding whether you're going to look on this Mac or in whatever folder it was that you were at when you started creating the saved search in this case I was in my documents folder which is just where I want to be I only want to find results in the documents folder if you want the results to be somewhere else then make sure you start in that folder now I'm going to click the plus button here and that allows me to define the search so my first example is simply going to be showing me the most recent files that I have opened so I'm going to change the criteria from name to last open date and then you can select within last you can also choose a bunch of other things like this year or today or before or after but let's do within last and then 30 days and then you'll see the results here and this shows you the files that have been opened in the last 30 days you could also choose to sort it how you want so you can have these sorted by name or you could have it sorted by date last open so the most recently opened files at the top then to create the smart folder click save now you get to name it so we'll call this recent 30 days and now we can save it anywhere we like but the default location is in your library folder in a folder called saved searches the only reason you would use that is if you also want to check add to sidebar this keeps the smart folder tucked away somewhere but adds it to the sidebar for easy access so if I click save here you can see it I get a smart folder under favorites and then let's say I'm somewhere else but I want to go and see my most recently open files I can click here and it jumps right to it if you ever want to customize it you can control click here and you can choose show search criteria and this allows you to alter the saved search so if I wanted to be more recent files like files within the last 10 days I can change it to that and click save and now I've just adjusted it and then you're probably also going to want to rename it then to recent 10 days now let's go back to the documents folder here and create a new smart folder but let's do something a little different this time instead of the most recently opened files let's look at creation date so we can say the creation date is within the last 30 days so this will just show you files that you've created in the last 30 days and ignore ones that were created before that even if you've opened them so this could come in handy in a variety of situations and note that you could also change it to last a modified date is within the last 30 days so this will show you files that weren't just opened but actually had changes made to them in 30 days now another thing you could do is set the criteria to kind and you could set the kind to something like document it'll show you all your documents files or you can have it be just image files even choose the image type here but if you choose other you can type the name of an app so if I want to see all my pages documents I can just type pages and it'll show me those if I want to see Microsoft Word document I can type word so you can save this and have a quick way to see all of your documents of that type you can of course combine this by clicking the plus button here and adding a last open date within the last 30 days and now you see all of the documents open say in Pages within the last 30 days you can also have it search for multiple types of files like for instance what if I wanted to see all of the word and Pages files together because maybe I use both apps interchangeably well let's get rid of this criteria here and I'm going to add plus here and instead of actually filling something out for this first section I'm going to hold the option key down and the plus changes to three dots I'm going to click that and then you get this any of the following are true or all the following are true or none of the following are true we'll leave it at any and then change this to kind is other and we'll say pages and then we'll click the plus button here and it adds a second criteria under any and we'll set that to kind is other is word and I can remove this top name matches one here and now you can see my results are any file where the kind is either Pages or word now another thing you could do is have it find your largest files so I click the plus button here and notice that there isn't an option for size that's okay because you can choose other and there's a huge list of items here so many of these have to do with metadata for images videos and sound but some of them have to do with just regular file things like size I can search for that and I can find file size here and if I even want that to appear in the menu I can check it here so it would always be there I won't have to search for it I can click OK and I can say file size and say is greater than and give it a certain amount so I could say for instance 10 mags and it will just show me the files larger than that I can sort it by size with the largest one at the top and save this as a smart folder to show me my largest files now you can also search by contents so I can change name to content here and contains and search for something like a word like this and we'll find it in any file that Spotlight indexes the contents so Pages word PDFs text files all sorts of things another option is to find all the files you've shared if you share files throughout iCloud drive you may lose track of which files have been shared and you don't want to look in every single folder and subfolder to find them so you can simply change the criteria here go to other look for shared and you can see is shared and then we can look for is shared yes you can also use tags so you won't find this here by default but if I choose other and I search for tags you can add it and then you could have tags matches and type the name of a tag like work or red and then like before you can hold the option key down click what was the plus button here and choose multiple tags in this case I want to get rid of this one so I'll change this to tags and then matches a tag name click plus also select tags and then matches and another tag name and you can see I get everything that matches either one of those tags another interesting one that can come in handy is if you search for where and you select where from select OK let me set it to contains and I'm going to type HTTP and what I'm seeing here are files that if I select the file and then get info on it with command I I look under more info there's where from and it gives a URL if it's a file that you downloaded online and of course the URL is almost always going to start with HTTP so this is a quick way to find files that you have downloaded from websites and if you like you can actually look at the where from there and take something from it so say if this was your company name here you could put this in there and anything you've downloaded from the company's servers then should show up in the smart folder Now using kind makes sense if you want to find files that are of a certain document kind like Pages what if we wanted to find files that have been exported from Pages like PDF files but PDF files that you made from Pages well you could do that by choosing other and then look for Creator and there's one called content creator choose that and set content creator to say pages and what you'll get here is a whole bunch of PDFs in this case and those PDFs are all files that were created from pages I could also choose something like say pixelmator and here are image files that I've exported from pixelmator and finally you can use this as an app launcher so I could set the criteria 2B that the kind is application and it's going to show me all the applications in the documents folder which aren't really any will be probably better is if I actually went to the applications folder and then I started the search here so I do file new smart folder applications click plus to add a criteria there do kind is application so I get all my applications but now click plus again and then do last open date and then say within the last say 10 days so I'm going to get apps that I've opened most recently and I could sort by date last open so this will be my most frequently used apps at the top or I could just sort it alphabetically and just have all of the apps that I've used very recently if I were to then save this and call it my apps and add it to the sidebar I can now anytime go to my apps here see all my recent apps and launch anyone that I want by just double clicking on it so I hope you like these ideas for using smart folders and I hope it encourages you to explore smart folders more to create some variations that you can use thanks for watching [Music] if you like this video click the Thumbs Up Button below to let me know I publish new tutorials each weekday hit the Subscribe button so you don't miss out

Channel: macmostvideo

Views: 47,772

Keywords: smart folders mac

Id: 66SodF42m-Y

Length: 10min 34sec (634 seconds)

Published: Thu Apr 06 2023