15 Tips For Using Icon View In The Mac Finder

If you use Icon View in the Finder to organize your files, here are some useful tips. You can place the icons where you want, or have them placed automatically by name, kind or time. You can also change the spacing and icon size, add more information to the file name and make other adjustments. You can also set a background color or image.

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Video Transcript: Hi this is Gary with MacMost.com. Today let me show you some tips for using Icon View in the Finder.
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So Icon View is what people think of most when they think of Finder Windows. List View and Column View both have their advantages but a lot of times people like the visual presentation of Icon View. It also has several unique features. One of which is the ability to arrange the icons however you want. They don't have to be alphabetical, or sort by size, or kind or something like that. You can put them in any order you want inside the Finder window.
You get to Icon View by clicking this button here, the first one in the list of Views, or going to View as Icons. You can see here a typical Icon View. Here's a folder with a bunch of different files and subfolders and they are arranged in no particular order. It's important to realize that there are two modes of Icon View. The first mode lets you put the icon wherever you want. So I can click and drag an icon and move it to any location. The second mode is when you use something like View, Sort By and you choose an option like Name. This locks in all of the icons so they are sorted in that order. It locks them on a grid. I can't really drag them anywhere. They're just going to snap back to that same location because it is always going to keep it sorted by Name. You could choose something else, like sorted by Date Last Opened and now the same thing. It's always going to keep them in this order. I can't place them where I want anymore.
Now another version of that is instead of using Sort By is to use Groups. When you do that the View Menu changes to Group By rather than Sort By. You can set to have them grouped by Name, Kind, Application that Opens Them, or Dates. You can see here it puts them in these little lists. You can't drag them anywhere else. They are arranged by this no matter how you drag them. Now do notice that if you switch to a Sort By or Group By View switching back to the regular Icon View it remembers the positions where each file was. So here you can see them in certain positions. I can go to View, Sort By Name and it sorts them by name. But then if I go View, Sort By None it remembers where they were.
Now you can use the View, Clean Up or Clean Up By options here to move the icons temporarily still giving you complete control over where they are afterwards. So I can say, for instance, Clean Up and all of the icons are going to move to the closest spot on the grid for each one with no icon overlapping. If I were to use Clean Up By and then say Clean Up By Name it will rearrange everything in order by name but I can still drag them and put them where I want afterwards. It's just a one time arrangement and then after that I can resume placing them exactly where I want. This allows you to do all sorts of interesting things. For instance I can just put a bunch of icons up here and group those together. Move other things apart from that and kind of create my own messy organization here. 
Also note there's also a way to clean up some of the files. So I can move a bunch of files here. Let's put a bunch in a little messy group there. I can drag around them. Control click on them and one of the options here is to Clean Up Selection. So when I do that just those files that are selected will be cleaned up. 
If you like the ability to put the icons where you want but you don't want them to be completely messy you can force every icon to fit to the closest grid location by going to View, Sort By, and then choosing this special Option Snap to Grid. When you do that it doesn't change anything right away but every time you move an icon it will snap it to the closest grid location. So you could easily move icons around and it will always fit on the grid perfectly. You can usually switch this Off to move things just a little bit differently and then switch it back On again.
Now you can customize this grid that I'm talking about. If you want the icons to be a little closer or further away go to View and Show View Options. This brings up the Options controls here and you've got Grid Spacing. So I can move it so the grid is a little further apart or closer together. This will effect when you Snap to Grid, when you Cleanup and if you're using one of the options here like Sort By and one of these then it will use this grid spacing to place all of the different icons.
You can also change the icon size. The default is a 64 x 64 icon. But you can make the icons bigger and smaller. Now the grid spacing doesn't have numbers applied to it because it depends on the icon size. So a larger icon size will also expand the grid a bit and then you can then expand the grid. Think of it as a spacing between the icons to adjust it to your liking. So you can change this and a folder full of images can actually become a good way to preview those images. The icon now makes it very easy to see the images inside. You could also work with the Text Size here. So the default is 12 point text. But you can go larger and you could see the files names for these icons are much larger there. You can go smaller as well.
Now you can also change where the labels are. Right now the labels appear underneath the icons. But you can switch that to be to the right. You can see it readjusts the grid a bit here. So now you have the icon and you've got the name to the right. This gives a very different look to Icon View. In addition to that you can also select Show Item Info. When you do that you get this blue text underneath the file name. What is shown there depends upon the item type. So for instance for a folder it's the number of items in the folder. For an image I can see the dimensions of the image. For an audio file or a video file I can see the length of the audio or video. For some other files type you actually see the size. Like this zip file shows the total size for that file. This also works well if you have the label position to the right and you can see those under there. 
Now with Icon View you have a very unique setting. The ability to change the background. The default will just view a white background. But you can switch to Color and then you get this color chip here.Click that and you can select any color you want for the background for the Finder window. You can click the color wheel here and choose, basically, any color that you want. Some colors work better than others. A dark color makes it very hard to see the file names. You also have the ability to set the background to a picture. When you do that you get a drop zone here to drag an image to. So I can drag an image like this and it becomes a background image for Icon View for this folder. Now you are going to want to choose an image that's a very light color here. This one doesn't work very well because you can see it's hard to read some of the file names. If I use something like this you could see the colors are muted back there and it's easy to see the file names and still have an interesting background. If you want to set any of these settings up here,, including the background, as the default for new Finder windows you can click Use as Default. But you can also then go to any specific location and change one of these or even the background for that location and that one will follow those rules while all the rest of them, the ones that don't have something specifically set, will then use the default.
Now in Column View you're used to seeing a large preview area to the right. You can actually bring that up in Icon View as well. Just go to View, Show Preview. You get that here to the right. When you select an item here it shows you a preview there and then also information and Quick Actions.
Now just because you're in Icon View here doesn't mean you can't use the keyboard to navigate around. So I haven't selected anything here. So when I use my arrow keys, say to go to the right, it's going to select the first icon it finds. But from there I can navigate in a logical way using all four arrow keys. If I want to rename a file I can just hit Return, Escape to exit that. If I want to preview a file in Quick Look I can hit Space. If I want to Open a file Command O. If I want to dig down into a folder I can do Command Down Arrow and that goes down into a folder. Then Command Up Arrow goes back up.
I can use this to Copy and Paste things. So for instance I can go Command Down Arrow into this folder. Then I'll go to the right, select this file, do Command C for copy. Command Up to go back up. I'll go to another folder and do Command Down to this folder. I can do Command V to paste a copy of the file or Option Command V to move the file there. You can see under Edit, Paste item and Option changes to move item here. So Option Command V will move the item there. I can use Command Z to Undo something like that. 
Now you can also use the cursor to move things around. It's a little more limited than using List or Column Views because it is hard to go up a level. But say I wanted to move this file here into this folder. Not only into that folder but into a subfolder of it. I can click and drag and spring-loading will mean that after a second there it opens up that folder. I can then go into another folder and then I can drop the file there. You can go up by using the back arrow here. So if I go down into this folder here I want to move this I want to go up a level I can go to the Back Button there. That takes me up a level. Then I can go down into another folder that takes me down into that level and I can drop it there. 
Also note that you can use Icon View in Open and Save dialogue in apps. So here I am in Pages. I can click here and change to Icon View and use Icon View here to view the files I'm going to open or the locations I'm going to save. Also note that the Desktop is just like a Finder window in Icon View. So you have these icons here. But I have all the same options. I can Sort By, and Sort By Name. I can Snap to Grid. I can Cleanup By and use one of these. I can go to Show View Options. I can switch the label positions to the right. I can Show Item Info. I can change the text size, grid spacing, and icon size all for the Desktop just like it's a Finder window using Icon View.

Comments: 4 Responses to “15 Tips For Using Icon View In The Mac Finder”

Rich Howell

5 months ago

I would love to sort by groups, but the View menu on my finder does not look like yours. Most of the options are not active and Groups is not there at all, even dimmed. I don’t see a preference to allow those options

Gary Rosenzweig

Rich: Which version of macOS are you using? Are you looking at a regular Finder window showing a regular folder, not a search result or space folder like “Recents?” What does your View menu show if it looks different?

Version 10.15.6- In Finder, I press “View” and see the first 4 options but not darkened. The next 4 are darkened. The only other option is “Show View Options.”0

I think I’ve solved the problem. To organize my desktop, I had to click on the hard drive image (folder) and then I had the shown options.

15 Tips For Using Icon View In The Mac Finder

Comments: 4 Responses to “15 Tips For Using Icon View In The Mac Finder”

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