How To Fix These 10 Mac Finder Annoyances

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Hi, this is Gary with MacMost.com.  Today let me show you ten   Mac Finder annoyances and how to fix them.  MacMost is brought to you thanks to a great  group of more than 1000 supporters. Go to   MacMost.com/patreon. There you can read more about   the Patreon Campaign. Join us and get  exclusive content and course discounts. So first let's start with the Desktop. A lot of  people complain that a lot of desktop space is   taken up by showing icons like the hard drive,  external drives, and other connected network   drives and things like that. You don't have to  show any of these on there. As a matter of fact   I don't have any hard drives showing on my  desktop at all. To get rid of these in the Finder,   go to Finder, Preferences, and then under  General look for Show These Items in the   Desktop. You can turn all of these off. That's  how I have it set. So anything on my Desktop is   a file or folder that I specifically put  there. Otherwise the Desktop is empty. Now when you create a new Finder window  it will go to a default location.   So I'll close this Finder window here and do File,  New Finder Window and you could see here it goes   to my Recents folder. If this isn't exactly  where you want it to go it could be annoying   and if it's some place you never want  to go, like perhaps your Recents folder,   then it's always annoying. So let's  go to Finder Preferences to fix this.   Under General here you'll have New Finder Window  Show and you can set it to anything that you want.   So instead of Recents you could pick say the  top computer level or your hard drive or your   User folder, Desktop, Documents, or use Other  and select any folder location that you want.   So, for instance, in iCloud Drive I could select  My Documents folder and then maybe a specific   folder that I want. Choose this and now when I  open a New Finder Window it will start there. Another annoyance could be your Sidebar here. It  would have lots of things in it that you don't   necessarily need. So go to Finder, Preferences  and go to Sidebar. There are a lot of default item   that you could turn On or Off. So, for instance,  you could get rid of Recents. You could get rid of   AirDrop. You could get rid of Downloads, Movies,  Music, Pictures, your Home folder. You can get rid   of all of these things. They're easy to get to  anyway. In the Finder you could just use the Go   menu. Most of these items are right here. They  even have keyboard shortcuts. So you can still   get to them pretty easily without having them  clutter up the Sidebar. Also near the bottom   of this list here under Locations there are a  lot of things that you might not want to see.   For instance you may not want to see external  drives, inserted optical media, Cloud storage,   other computers on your network. You can  get rid of all of these things. As a matter   of fact if you get rid of everything under  Locations that whole category just goes away.   Then anything else that you've got in here, maybe  something you've added on your own, you can get   rid of by dragging away. As soon as you see the  X there you can release it and it will disappear   from the Sidebar. You can easily add something  back by just dragging it into the Sidebar. Now notice here some of these file names have  extensions and others don't. You'd rather always   see extensions. You can turn that on in Finder  Preferences under Advanced. The first checkbox   here is Show All File Name Extensions. By turning  it On you could see now it's there for all files.   On the other hand if you'd rather have it Off,  turn it Off, note that when you create a file   name, if you add the extensions when you're typing  the file name, it will appear there. You can use   Command i to bring up the Info window and here is  where you could Hide the extension for one where   you've set it to be On. So you can switch it On  or Off individually for File but any file that   you haven't set that for, that's going to obey  that universal setting in Finder Preferences. Now under Finder Preferences in Advanced, there's  also a set of warnings that you can turn Off.   There's Show Warning Before Changing an Extension,   Show Warning Before Removing something from  iCloud Drive, and Show Warning Before Emptying   the Trash. If one or more of these is an  annoyance to you, you can switch them Off. When you start a Search in the Finder either  using the iCloud here or Command F it's going   to search in a specific location. It may start  in this Mac All your Files or it may start in a   certain folder. The default for where it starts  can be annoying if it's not where you want.   You can set this in File Preferences. In Advanced  there's when performing a search you could have it   set to the current folder which is probably your  best option. But you could also have it go to the   previous search scope or Always Start on This Mac.  Anyone of those three, though, when you set it you   have to get used to looking here to make sure  it's where you want it to be before you start   performing your search. There's no good answer.  Your Mac can't really read your mind and figure   out where you want to search. The only real  solution is to always learn to go where you want   to start the search first and then do the search  and have it set to use the current location. Now you don't always see all the files  that are in a folder. There are hidden   files. Usually they're hidden for a  reason. They are not something you   would normally want to access. This could be  annoying though when you do want to access   that file or folder or conversely it could  be annoying when you see these invisible   files and you're not sure how you ended up being  able to see them and you want to get rid of them.   Well, the keyboard shortcut to Show or Hide  hidden files is Command Shift and Period. So   you can see here it is showing me the hidden  files in my Home folder. This could be useful   if I want to see my Library folder, for instance.  But if you accidentally turn this On it could be   really annoying if you don't know how to turn  it Off. Just Command Shift Period turns it Off. When you're in List View you've got columns here  at the top and I hear a lot of people complain   it's annoying that the columns either aren't  the right size for them or they're not showing   the right information they want to see. Or maybe  they're not in the right order. After all if you   shrink this window you could easily cutoff some of  these columns. Well, this is all customizable. You   can grab the line between anyone of these columns  and change the size for the column. You could   click on a column and drag it left or right to  reposition it. So you can take the column that's   more important to you and move that further to the  left. You can also change which columns are there.   You can do this a few different ways but  the quickest way is to Control click,   two finger click on the trackpad or right click  on the mouse, on anyone of these columns here   and then you can select which column to  Show or Hide. So if I want to have Date   Last Opened instead of Date Modified  I can add Date Last Opened. I can   Hide Date Modified and I can move this here to  the left since it's the most important one for me.   Then, of course, you can sort by any of  these by clicking on the column to sort.   Pay attention to the arrow here for the direction.  Click again and it changes the direction. So this is actually one of the annoyances I  hear about the most. You get a Preview area   here to the right side of the Finder.  This can appear here in List View.   It can appear in Icon View. It's very common to  appear in Column View where it's on by default.   While I find this to be a very handy feature  but a lot of people end up seeing it and don't   realize how they turned it on and now they want  to turn it off. It's just here under View and   then it's Show or Hide Preview or Shift Command  P. It will show or hide that in any Finder view. A common annoyance that even I deal with  sometimes is that when you select a file   and then use Command i for File, Get Info it  brings up the info window here. So let's move   that over here to the right. Now let's say I  want to select this file. Notice that the Info   window is still showing the info for the first  file. But I want it to follow me around. When I   select some other file I want to see info for that  file. So to do that instead of the Info Window,   when you go to File, Get Info hold the Option  key down and you'll see that Command Option i is   Show Inspector. The Inspector looks a lot like  the Info Window except it will change to show   the info for whatever is selected. It's a bonus  if you select multiple files. It will actually   combine those and show combined information.  Like the total size for all of those files. Now here's a bonus one. I always like it to keep  a clean desktop and not have files like this   cluttering the desktop. So to that end I  rarely have files on the desktop. But I   know that other people work in different  ways. Sometimes you have a lot of files   on the desktop. If you need to clean this off  really quickly, like maybe to do a presentation,   you would have to take the time or organize  your files, move them off to the proper folders   in your Documents folder or wherever you want to  have them which can be time consuming. If you're   crunched for time there is a way to get rid of the  files here on the desktop. Remember the Desktop is   just a regular folder. If in the Finder here  I go to Desktop I can see my Desktop folder   is the same files that are here. So it's just  two ways of looking at the same location.   But if I'd rather only have these files in the  Desktop folder in a Finder window and not have   it actually rendered here on the Desktop, I could  do that using a hidden setting. You've got to go   to Terminal and then use a special command.  This will change the default for the Finder   for a property called Create Desktop. It's  going to set it to the bullion value of False.   Then in order to enact it you've got to restart  the Finder. So Kill All Finder will do that. Now notice what happens is the Desktop  is no longer rendered using the icons.   I still set that those files are actually on  the Desktop. So the files are still there.   They haven't moved. Just the Desktop is no longer  showing those files. So this could be handy in an   emergency situation although you certainly  don't want to use this normally as it can   get confusing. You can think you have an empty  Desktop and you actually have all these files   in your Desktop folder. To turn this Off  just use the same Command but True instead   of False. Restart the Finder again and now it's  rendered with those files on the Desktop again. Once you get in the habit to move it's just  you've changed the behavior of the Desktop   to no longer show files even though they're still   there. So I hope you found these  tips useful. Thanks for watching.
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Channel: macmostvideo
Views: 28,639
Rating: undefined out of 5
Keywords: mac finder tips, mac finder tips and tricks, mac finder annoyances, mac finder settings, mac finder preferences, mac finder preview, mac finder hidden, mac finder tricks
Id: cNUUIAX-uIM
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Length: 10min 4sec (604 seconds)
Published: Mon Jul 19 2021
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