Best Way To Organize Files and Folders on a New Mac

the best way to organize files or folders on a brand new Mac let's talk about it [Music] welcome back to the channel so what we're going to do today is we're going to talk a little bit about how to organize your Mac files and folders best practice to keep everything clean and tidy on your Mac so I'm going to try to keep it very simple and just show you some Basics right so you can get through it really quickly just to show you like if you get a brand new Mac how you want to keep and how you want to organize all your file structures on your Mac so you can find everything later and how to kind of clean your house I'll get into that in a second so stay tuned I think everybody can learn a little bit about this or from this even if you're an advanced user let's get into it all right so we all know how it feels if you have a very dirty house right when your house is dirty you don't feel that good right well the same thing is with a computer so when you clean your house you feel much better and the computer is the same way the problem with the computer though is if you let it get kind of out of hand let's say you kind of just let all your files and folders just go everywhere on your Mac or your computer you're going to end up feeling really bad and you're going to feel kind of helpless and trying to fix that later right it gets such a mess that you don't even know where to start to go back to a clean Mac once again and you feel like all your files are missing you can't find things so what I want to do is show you is just a simple way when you get a new Mac or even if you don't have a new Mac just what you can start right now and how you can kind of just basically structure your files and folders where to save stuff and how everything works just in a nutshell just so that you're gonna have a clean system keep it consistent with all your other Macs if you ever buy ones in the future and just know hey I got a clean computer I feel good all right just really quickly this is really easy so look at your desktop right you've all seen desktops like this with tons of folders and stuff and I'm guilty of it too right we all do it and that's not really best practice let me just show you what it is first of all you want to just you know obviously your your desktop is basically just a folder right so I got two I got a folder over here and a file over here so when I go down to you know finder down here open up finder and I move this to the middle you're going to see on the left hand side here's your desktop kind of folder I click on it here's the actual folder right there and see it over here it's right in here here's the file right here so if I create another folder just like this and I call it test it's going to obviously instantly right there it's going to show up inside this folder so just think of when you click just think of your desktop as a folder any file or folder you put in there or any subfolders and what have you you can get to over here in finder you click on the desktop and they're all in here just kind of like under the desktop folder right even though it's a little different but any case you'll that's kind of just one thing to learn off the bat of course you'll see up here there's something that's not in that folder and this is going to be this is the yellow thing here is a hard drive and that's basically because I plugged in an external SSD drive it shows up there to show me that it's plugged in that's a little bit different but any folder or file you put on your desktop you're going to see in that desktop thing in finder the problem is is you just don't want a million things out here that's not best practice and I'm going to show you what is and how you should really structure your Mac in general all right number two just to understand then we'll get into the structure if you go down to finder down here and you click on finder you're going to notice it opens up this kind of recents folder you'll see it over here it always kind of defaults to that you're going to see all the recent documents that have been opened well a lot of people think that's a folder sometimes they drag things in there thinking they can store them in there and stuff that's not actually a recents is not a folder right this just lists recent files that you've had open before so if I go ahead and click on any of these files let's pick one and you go down to your keyboard hold the option key down and then look hold it down for a second then look down here as you're holding it it's going to give you where this file actually is stored you'll notice that it's not stored inside of the the recent you know folder there's not a folder it's stored down here under desktop iMac 24 and then here's the name of the file so any file you can do that with you click on it you hold down the option key for a second and watch it'll just show up like in about a second it shows up down here it gives you the path all right if you don't want to have to keep clicking the option button you can go as long as finders open go up to view up here and then go down to show path bar click on that and you'll notice now that any anything I click on any any file down here it just changes this automatically and it just stays there so it always will give you that path without having to click the option key I just wanted to make sure people understood what that recent thing was so a couple things here now I have a website open here and I'm going to download just this is just a landscape so let's just go ahead and download this landscape you'll see it goop now I just downloaded a file right off the internet like we all do so if I go back over to finder on clicked on finder you're going to notice that it downloaded and it went right into this downloads folder and that's that's the way it should be right it's in the downloads folder right now the weird thing is and again this is not that important but if I go to recents you'll see this not even showing up here it's not in recents because people will say well I just recently did something with it but you didn't open it right so if I go back to downloads I double click on it there's the file then I shut it down now if I go to recents just like that it's at the top you're going to see that it shows up there finally obviously that's not where it is like I told you it's somewhere else it's in the downloads folder all right so all your stuff in the downloads folder so what's best practice well let me just tell you you should never have anything in your downloads folder and sometimes you have to do this every week or sometimes you just do it as soon as you download a file but you never want to keep anything in the downloads folder all right so what you really want to do is this so I have this finder winner open over here and you can go once finder is open you can go up to finder again and then file and then new finder window right there see it that's going to open up a second one just so you can have them side by side so what you want to do here is you want to put everything in your documents folder and you want to create subfolders depending on what you're putting in there so I'm going to click on my documents folder over here see it and this is the downloads folder now I've created some these are things I've created some folders from before and you'll notice I have downloaded pictures in here to see it right there so this is a downloaded picture right so what I want to do is I want to take this move it over to to downloaded pictures right there drop it in now my downloads folder is empty again and that's the way it always should be the problem is if you keep downloading things and downloading things you're going to probably have 3 000 different documents in here and you're gonna have no idea what they are so best practice is always to download something and even at the end of the week create folders and then in your documents directory here folder directory and they basically create a new folder and I can go like Pages document you know something like that and then over time you can basically add stuff that you want to that folder but anything I download then will get moved to these specific folders and you shouldn't even stop there for instance under the downloaded pictures here if I click on it you'll notice that I have a bunch of pictures in here that's not really the right thing to do either you really want to have subfolders in here and you want to put everything under a subfolder so like all these things here all these different files here might want to go under Landscapes like that and just so you have nothing in there so that you have downloaded pictures but then I have a whole subcategory of other things below that and so everything has basically got a folder nothing's floating there's no files floating anywhere in here so obviously they're all under the specific folder and that makes it a lot cleaner and you can drill down on stuff and find exactly what you need so that's really the best practice area right there I'm going to show you another tip so I think we all know that if you hold down shift command and you push four let me look at my screen I can take a screenshot see these little you know obviously it puts these little crosshairs out and I can drag and hear that it makes a screenshot so it takes a screenshot of whatever I outline there if I do shift command three it'll just take a screenshot of the entire screen want a new Mac you'll see over here that these files they show up here but then they move over here so now I have both of them saved over here on the desktop and I just told you you don't want things saved on the desktop so I like to take screenshots all the time of just documents or I'll take a screenshot of something on the Internet to save it for later to read the problem is it saves it saves it over to my desktop not even to the downloads menu right and that's a problem because now I gotta then move these somewhere else and do all that kind of stuff or most of the time I forget about them and I just clutter my desktop up all right so what you want to do to fix this so that nothing's happening or nothing's going to your desktop as you go down here click on launch pad right here and then look for a screenshot see it right there so what you want to do in here is under screenshot don't click anything there's a little menu down here you want to click on options see it there and then basically it says save to right there and you want to go all the way down to other location click on that and then basically once you're in here you can click you can kind of click on the left hand side click on documents now I created a folder in here called screen chat see it right there so I'm going to click that and then click choose so now the cool part is let me just click out of this let me let me just see how I can get out of this all right so now if I take a screenshot let me just do shift command let me just do shift command four I'm going to take a little snippet or something you're going to see down here that it actually took the screenshot right but you're going to notice that it's not going to save it to the desktop any longer all right so now if I go in over here and I go to basically this finder again and I click on documents I did create there here there's the screenshot folder that I created earlier I click on that open that up and you're going to see that the screenshots are now saving into that location automatically instead of you having to drag them over there so you can do this with anything all right you can go into Pages down here and if you open up a Pages document let me go ahead and open that up I'm just going to open up a sample one just something like this essay here so here here's one right here now again the same thing if you actually go up to pages and you go file what you can do here is you can instead of clicking save you can go ahead and hold down the option key and then it's going to give you different menus here and one of the adaptions is going to be save as see that so if I un if I un if I don't click on the option it's not there I hold down the option it says save as so I'm going to click on that now what I can do here again is I can click on my documents folder and then I can pick the folder that I want over here and let's just say it's under I don't want it under there but Pages document there it is and then I can go ahead and name whatever I want to name this test then I can save it right so now it's not going to just save it to you know your downloads or save it somewhere like under some weird directory or something it's actually you've selected where you want that saved and basically if I go into finder and I click on documents now I can see that let me go ahead and get rid of some of this stuff but here's Pages document and there's the test document so I didn't have to move anything in that case so anything you do on your computer you can set it up to go into those directories and those are again if you go into finder it's going to be under your documents directory and nothing should be under your downloads directory because everything you download from there should be moved to your documents directory just like I showed you and you should have structures in there that easily let you know what's going on the issue is going to be a lot of people say hey I can't have a lot of these search things on my computer like I can use Spotlight right I can use all these different Mac Search terms and stuff to find the files I need I don't need this but all you know you have to then follow a very strict naming you know system on all your files which a lot of people don't do you see what I downloaded that image it was crazy the name of it you're never going to find that thing you're never going to find it again unless you put it in the right spot and you can find it something later with a hierarchy of your folders so I just hope that this helps people I know it's kind of very basic but I wanted to show people there's kind of a structure behind how you want to do this on a new Mac and what it does is it keeps it very clean I guarantee 90 of people out there if they go into your downloads folder right now you're going to end up having a million files in there and you're going to say how do these all get here even or why are they here what am I doing with all these and you're going to have no structure right you're going to have no idea why you have those there but if you follow this system from the very start every single time that you actually download something even if it's at the end of the week you decide to move everything over to those correct folders you'll have a clean downloads you know folder like I showed you and you'll have nothing to worry about at the end of it you'll have a clean house again clean desktop up and you know you'll be happy just like your house if it gets dirty you're kind of all stressed out and everything but if it's clean you're going to be a happy person and that's what this video is all about so I hope this helps people I know I'm all over the place with it I just hope that you got something out of it it's just the best practice and how you want to name stuff and how you want to keep things in certain places it just makes life a lot easier and we'll talk to you in the next video peace

Channel: Craig Neidel

Views: 59,774

Keywords: Organize Mac files, Best Way To Organize Files and Folders on a New Mac, How to setup a new Mac, New Mac help, file structure MacOS, Organize folders in MacOS, How To organize Files in MacOS, To to use MacOS, Setup a new Mac, best way to setup a new mac, File and folders MacOS, Apple Files and Folders, File and Folder Tutorial MacOS, Tutorial MacOS, Files and Folder Tutorial Mac, Help Setting Up A New Mac, Where files go on a Mac, Finder on Mac, Help with MacOS Finder, MacOS

Id: 0tcq57_IvKA

Length: 11min 36sec (696 seconds)

Published: Wed Apr 26 2023