10 Pro Features Of the Mac Finder

Hi, this is Gary with MacMost.com. Here are 10 Pro tips for using the Mac Finder. 

So this video is for people that know the basics of using the Finder. You can open a Finder window, go to your files, open your files, and do things like that. But now you want to go a step further and see what features the Finder you can use to better manage your files and folders. 

So let's start off here with a simple Finder Window. I'm in Icon View here and I'm in a folder called Current Stuff. Now let's say I want to go up a level. I know Current Stuff is in my Documents Folder. But how do I get to my Documents Folder. You can just click on Documents here in the left Sidebar. But let's say it's even deeper than that and I want to get somewhere in-between. There is no button or anything to go Up a single level above the level you're at. But there is a Menu Command under Go called Enclosing Folder. The keyboard shortcut for that is Command and then the Up Arrow. So to go up from Current Stuff to the folder that contains Current Stuff you would do Command and then Up Arrow. Now you're up one level here in the Documents Folder. It even selects the folder where you were previously so you know where you're at. 

That's not the only way to go up. You can also use the Title here to see the entire path all the way to the top and jump to any level in-between. What you need to do is hold the Command Key down and then Click. It will open up a Menu showing you all of the levels above. So I can jump to my Documents Folder, or even all the up to iCloud Drive. 

Another way to do this is to use a button here in the Toolbar. But you won't see the  button here. This is the default set. You can Customize the Toolbar by Control Clicking, two-finger click on a trackpad, right click on a mouse, on the toolbar here and then choose Customize Toolbar. Then you can drag more buttons to the Toolbar here. One of those is Path. Drag Path here like that and then click Done. Path does the same thing as Command clicking on the Title, you just don't have to hold down a key. You just click there and you see every level above and can jump to one. 

Now when you're looking at a Finder Window you may be missing the two rows of information here at the bottom. This row is called the Path Bar and this row is called the Status Bar. You can turn these On by going to the View Menu and looking for these two menu items. You would see Show Path Bar and Show Status Bar and you can easily turn them on. Now you have another way of seeing the full Path to where you are at and jumping to any level. You'll also see here in the Status Bar the number of items currently being shown and how much space is available. In this case how much space is available in iCloud since this is in iCloud. But if I were to go to my Home folder here you can see it is going to show me how much space is available in my local storage. 

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Now we're looking at the Documents Folder here in Icon View. We get these nice big icons in a two dimensional grid. This is fine if you just have a few folders or files. It's also nice when you're looking at images or videos and you can see a little preview there, like that. But a more Pro level view is to use Column View. You may see this group of four buttons here allowing you to switch between views. If you don't have enough room, like the Finder Window is a little smaller, then you're going to see a menu that replaces that instead of four individual buttons like this. You can also go to View and then the first four items here are the four Finder Views. Note the keyboard shortcuts. So let's switch to Column View. Column View will now show you everything in that folder here in a list. But if you select something that is a folder itself it will now show you the contents of that folder in another column. You can continue with another folder, like that. Using this view makes it very easy to jump around. Instead of having to go back up from this level all the way to Documents and then go somewhere else I can just quickly select something here in the Documents column and jump right to that folder. It is very easy to quickly move around between folders and it is very easy to move things around. You can just Drag & Drop a file like this into a folder like that. 

An even better view, in my opinion, is List View. The second option right here. When you select that you're going to see everything in a list as before BUT you also get columns that contain information. So here I can see the Date Modified. I can see Size, although these are all folders here, and Kind. If I were to dive down into this folder here and switch to List View there you see I get Date Added, Date Modified, Kind, Size, even Tags right here. You can adjust the width of any column by grabbing in-between the column Headings, like that. You can Control click, two-finger click, or right click on any of these and add more information. You can also Sort by any of these. If I want to sort by Date Added I just click Date Added. If the Sort is going in the wrong direction I click again and you can see how that little arrow there changes direction. So I can Sort by Name, Date Added, Kind, all sorts of different things. You can remain in List View and still look inside of folders. So I can click just to the left of the Icon here on this little Reveal Arrow to see the contents of this folder while remaining at the Documents folder level. You can do that for multiple folders. So I can open up both of these folders here and even go deeper, like that. So I can now move files between folders very easily and just view as much as I want. 

Now if you use Column View you may notice that if you select a folder that has images in it or really any file type, if you select one of them you'll see a preview on the right. The last column is this area called the Preview Pane. It gives you not only a preview of the image or other types of documents, for instance here is a text file and it will give me a preview of that, but you also get information here at the bottom about the file. This is really useful but a lot of people don't realize it's not specific to just Column View.  So for instance I can use List View here and then I can, say, look inside one of these folders and select a file and I can get that same column on the right by going to View and then Show Preview and it gives me exactly that. I get a preview of the file here of whatever file type it is. So I would see an image there or a video there and I get information here at the bottom. This just remains there as I select different files. 

Now as you probably already know you can move files by dragging and dropping them. Here in List View it is easy, say, to move this file to another folder like that. I can also have a second Finder window open and have that going to a different location, like this, and then drag from one window to another to move a file. 

But another way to do it is to select a file and then go to Edit and use Copy, or just Command C. If you go into a different folder here and now want to move the file there you can go to Edit and then Paste. That will actually make a duplicate of the file and put the duplicate there. Holding the Option Key down will change it to Move Item. So Command V puts a copy in the new location. Option Command V moves the original file out of the original location to this new location. 

I know people who come from a Windows environment are used to using Command X for Cut and Command V for paste. But that's not the way it works on the Mac. You use Command C to Copy either for duplicating or moving a file and then you decide whether to duplicate or move it by choosing either Command V or Option Command V on the Mac. 

I'm often asked about how to Copy the Path to a file. There are several different ways to do it. You select a file and you've got the Path Bar here. You can control click, right click, or two-finger click on the file here and one of the things you can select is Copy As Path Name. But you also can just select the file, go to Edit and where there is Copy, hold the Option Key down. That changes to Copy As Path Name as well. 

Now if you like using the keyboard as much as possible you can actually navigate around in the Finder to any location using the Go Menu and the Go To Folder command. But everybody just uses Shift Command G to bring up this functionality. So I'll use that and you can type any path you want here. Just like with the Terminal you can use the tilde character to represent your Home Folder and then slash and then you can start typing a name. You can actually auto-complete the name with Tab, like that, and you can auto-complete the next set right there, and then Return. It will jump to that folder. Notice, too, it remembers recent paths. It will also work kind of as a search through those recents. So if I just start typing the name of a folder you see how it finds it in Recents and I don't have to type anything else but this. I don't need to type the full path to actually get there. 

Now Searching is pretty straightforward in the Finder. Just use the little Search button here. You click and then you type something and it will find whatever it is you search for either as something in the name or something in a file, or you can specify just the name or just the content, like that. But you can get a lot more complex by instead of clicking there just use Command F. This will usually open up a new window or tab and take you to this whole search interface here and you can decide whether to search the entire Mac or just this location. You can select from this list here. You can search for things like Name Is, or Contains and then look for something like that. You can click the Plus Button and add more criteria like that. You can hold the Option Key down and click here and it will add a boolean search component, so you can search for Any, All, or None, basically Or and/or Or Not, and add multiple bits of search criteria right here. But you can also just do boolean searches here as long as you keep them simple. So, if I want to search for something just by name I would type Name colon and then with no space something to search for in the name. So notice all the results here have the word test in the name. If I also want them to be JPEGs I can hit a space and then type the word and, but it has to be all uppercase. Then I can do Name and then dot JPG like that and notice all of the results fit that criteria. But I can also do something like NOT and you'll see that I get only things that are Not JPEGs here. 

One more tip I want to show you is that if you want to Rename a file of course you probably know you can select a file, press the Return Key, and this selects the name there and now you can type a new name. But another way to get to that is to go to File, and then Rename, it does the same thing as pressing Return. However, if you have multiple files selected then you go to File, then Rename, now this will take you to the Batch Rename tool, which gives you the ability to Replace text in all of the selected files, replace something with something else. You can Add text to all of the files before name or after name, or you can Format adding things like Numbers and Dates and Times and stuff to the files. It will even give you an example here what it is going to do to those. So, for instance, I can rename all three of these using just some letters and starting numbers at 100, and rename like that. You can see what I get. 

Here's another Pro Tip that I haven't mentioned yet. You can use Edit Undo in the Finder after you've moved files or changed a name or in this case do a Batch Rename. A lot of people don't realize that Undo works in the Finder just like it works, say, in a word processor. So I'll Undo and you'll see all three of those files go back to their original names. 

One more bonus tip here for those that don't already know this. You don't have to have multiple Finder Windows open. You certainly can. You can have multiple Finder Windows each looking at different locations but you can use Tabs instead. Just like in a web browser. So go to File and then instead of New Finder Window do New Tab or Command T. Now you've got two Tabs and these can point to different locations, like this. So you can have a whole bunch of Tabs opened up and have just one Finder Window and not have to worry about always moving around in the Finder. Just have in those Tabs the places that you need to be and you can Drag & Drop between Tabs. So if I want to move this file to the Current Stuff folder I can drag it over to the Tab, wait a second, and now drop it into this folder. 

So I hope you found these Finder tips useful. Thanks for watching.