Make the Mac Dock More Powerful By Adding Special Folders

hi this is gary with macmost.com let me show you how you can make the dock much more useful by adding a collection of folders to the right side [Music] macmost is brought to you thanks to a great group of supporters go to macmost.com patreon there you could read more about it join us and get exclusive content so you probably have your most frequently used apps in the doc already but did you know you could add folders to the right side of the dock to make it much more useful this could be specific folders they could be smart folders they could be folders filled with aliases there are all sorts of ways to get quick access to your applications and all sorts of files by using the right side of the dock so by default you should already see a downloads folder in the right side of your dock this is very useful as you can click on it you can see which files you've recently downloaded and you can even drag and drop out of here to some other place or click on them to open them up now to make this more useful you can control click on it and i like switching from fan to grid view which i think is a little bit better for downloads and you can still drag and drop from it list view which you think would be the ultimate because you can display a lot more stuff you have a lot more room but you can't drag and drop from it unfortunately the other thing i like to do is to switch to display s folder because instead of seeing the most recent document icon there i'm going to see a folder and the downloads folder actually has a pretty nice looking icon but we could add so much more to the right side of the dock one of my favorites is the applications folder let's go to file new finder window and then go and then let's go to the computer level and from there let's dig down into the hard drive level where we see our applications folder let's drag that applications folder over here and drop it in now the applications folder is there if i click on it i'm going to see my applications but it's a lot more useful if i set it to list view now you click on it and you get this list here that even allows you to go down into subfolders so you literally have access to every single application in your applications folder so your doc shows you the applications you like to use the most but if you want to use anything else you click on this applications folder on the right and now you can launch any application you want i also like to change this to display as folder view since the applications folder has a nice icon as well and there's no reason i should be looking at the very first application in alphabetical order as the icon here now you can use this same idea to create something where you can get to all of your documents so i can create a new finder window and you can see i'm in my documents folder let me control click here and go up one level an icloud drive and there is the documents folder i can drag and drop that into here i'm going to also go ahead and change that to display as a folder and i'm going to change it to list view and now i can access any document inside my documents folder so it's pretty handy but if there are certain folders that you access all the time you may want to go and have those there as well or instead so for instance say if the my projects folders want to use a lot i could put that one in there let me change that to display this folder let me change it to list view and now have a handy way to access the files in this folder the next step would be to add folders that do specific things like for instance let's say we want to see the most recent documents that we've been working with so let's create a new finder window and go to a good starting point for a search what we're going to do is create a new smart folder so we want to start at the location where we're going to do the search for the smart folder so let's say we want things in my documents folder so we start in the documents folder level now we'll go to file new smart folder and you can see it says search documents so we're in the right place now we want to hit the plus button to give some criteria so what we want to do now is say last open date is within the last let's say 30 days that's our most recent documents now we can further go in and modify this i'm going to hit the plus button and let's say kind is a document and now we'll save this smart folder here and you can see it's going to save it in a place called saved searches which is in your home directory under library under saved searches that's fine let's give it a name such as recent documents and we'll make sure add to sidebar is not checked because that's not what we want and we're going to save it here but not before i select here and do command r which is going to open up a finder window looking at saved searches and i can go into there and see the saved searches so let's finish saving here we'll save and you can see recent documents got added there now we can close the rest of these windows we're still looking at saved searches i can shrink this down a bit let's drag and drop recent documents in here put it there if i click on it now i'm going to see recent documents i can modify that control by control clicking on it let's display it as a folder it's going to give us this cool little look for a saved search or smart folder so i'm going to do list view here so everything's sorted in a nice order control click on it make sure sort by is set to last opened now we can create other saved searches to do other things as well so for instance i can do a new finder window there i am in documents let's say i want to do a smart folder that shows me my most recent images because i work with images a lot so i will add criteria there i'll do the last open date is within the last let's say 365 days and then i'll say the kind is an image and i could pick the type of image as well and i'll just do save here and i'll save this one as recent images and now when i look in the safe searches folder i can see there's a recent images folder there now i can drag that there and i'll set it up the same way display it as a folder i'll have it to do a list view and i'll make sure it's sorted by last opened or maybe in this case i want to sort by name instead and i can click here i can see all the images i've opened in the last year and access anyone by clicking on it maybe i want to set this one to a grid view instead because now i can see nice previews of these images and i can still scroll through them pretty easily you may also want to have a smart folder that shows you all the documents made by a certain application so we can go to new finder window we can start at the documents level or even up higher if you want we can do new smart folder and then say add the criteria that the kind is other and then type the name of the application so say if we wanted all our numbers documents we'll hit save and we'll save this as all numbers documents and now we'll close these here's the all numbers documents smart folder we can drag and drop that into the dock as well and set it up like we want and now we can see all of our numbered documents in one place regardless of which folder that they're in in addition you may want to have things that are not the results of smart searches so let's go to the documents folder and let's create a new folder here and this is just a place to hold some folders we're going to create that are going to be placed in the dock so i'll just call this doc folders and we'll go in there and there's nothing in there but i'm going to add a new folder and i'm going to call this special projects and then i'm going to open up a new finder window here and then pick some files that i want to be in the special projects folder let's go into this project a folder here and let's say i want this one called my shared file in there i'm going to drag it but hold the command and option keys down you can see the arrow changes to a curved arrow there and drop that in now when i look in special projects i see i've got this icon but it's got this curved arrow which means it's an alias or shortcut to the original file so the original file is still there this is just a shortcut to it and i could go and add more files to it if i want so let's add this one again holding option and command put that one in there put this one in here maybe go into another one and do this one now i've got four shortcuts to four different files in different places let's go up a level here so we have that special projects folder i'll add that to the dock as well change it to folder change it to a list view and i click on it now i have quick access to any of those files if i want to add more files to that i don't need to do anything to the dock i can simply go and add another shortcut here into this folder and now that appears here as well and you could do this with other things as well for instance you can create a folder here called graphics apps and then use the option and command keys to drag aliases from applications into there and have say a group of 10 different graphics apps here that you could easily now access in a folder in the dock so really the sky's the limit here you can create folders and fill them with aliases to all sorts of things you can have folders inside of folders you can have folders with smart folders in them so it's all a matter of learning these simple skills and then applying them to your workflows to make the doc that much more useful [Music] i publish new tutorials every weekday hit the subscribe button so you don't miss out then hit the little bell icon to get notifications for each new tutorial

Channel: macmostvideo

Views: 84,006

Keywords: customizing the mac dock, customizing the dock, mac dock folders, dock folders, smart folders, mac smart folders, mac aliases, mac shortcuts, Dock, folders, Smart Folders, right, aliases, shortcuts, applications, mac, macmost, dock folders mac, smart folders mac

Id: oG1J3MN6UDI

Length: 9min 42sec (582 seconds)

Published: Fri Nov 29 2019