The Problem With "Recents" In the Finder On Your Mac

Hi, this is Gary at MacMost.com. Let's take a look at what's wrong with Recents in the Finder on your Mac and how you can get something better. 

Now when you use the Mac Finder there's an item on the left side called Recents and there's a few things wrong with it. So here if I click on Recents I would expect to find my most recent files here. Well, there are two things wrong right away. First of all the name Recents is very wrong. If you scroll through this you'll find that it is not just recents but stuff that goes back years. Maybe Apple has a paleontologist working on the Mac Finder. It's basically all of your files. The only thing recents-like about this is it is sorted by Date Last Opened. So, the most recent things are at the top. But it is really all your files. In fact it used to be called All Files a long time ago. Now, that's not a big deal. What is a big deal is you'll sometimes not find things that are very recent. For instance, if I go to my Downloads Folder here I've got several files and these files are very recent. Three of them were downloaded today. One a few days ago. Yet if I look in Recents I won't find those files. The most recent one is from yesterday. Not today. So you download a new file and it won't be in Recents, which doesn't seem to make much sense. 

So the reason for this is Recents is actually showing you only files that you have opened and then sorting them by date last opened. So when you download a file you haven't opened it yet and have no value for that. So, even if it did appear in this list, it would appear at the bottom after even your oldest files. 

Now that you know that you can continue to use Recents as before just realizing that when you download something it's probably not going to appear here and you should remember to go to the Downloads folder directly to find it. But you could also create something to replace Recents that's better. 

If you find these videos valuable consider joining the more than 2000 others that support MacMost at Patreon. You get exclusive content, course discounts, and more. You can read about it at macmost.com/patreon. 

In the Finder here I'm going to start by going to my Home folder. So all my files will be under here. Even if I don't see Desktop & Documents from iCloud they will be included if I search in my Home Folder. Now that I have the Home Folder open I can go to File and then Find or Command F to start a complex Search here. I can ignore the search field at the top and start adding criteria here. It starts you off with Kind is Any. Leave that there. What I want to do is search for files that have been actually opened recently. So not all my files. But not just opened but also modified because downloaded files will show a Modified Date of when they were downloaded. So I'm going to go to where the Plus Button is here to add a New Criteria to this. But I'm going to hold the Option Key down and you can see Plus changes to 3 dots. If you click it now you'll get a Grouping where you can choose Any, All, or None of the following are true. So, with Any of the following are true set here I can say I want the Last Opened Date is within the last, let's say, ninety days. I click Plus to the right of that and say the Last Modified Date is within the last ninety days. 

So this will give me any files in the last ninety days that have either been opened or modified. Now that I have got that I can choose a Sort Order. Let's choose Date Modified. So I will sort with the most recently modified at the top. You could choose Date Last Opened as well. If you don't see either of those there you can Control Click anywhere in this bar and add or remove items. So, Date Modified and Date Last Opened. If I sort by Date Modified I will see these at the top. Date Last Opened I will probably see different things at the top especially considering that the things in the Downloads Folder haven't been opened yet. So Date Last Modified is probably your best choice here. The only thing is, is that if you opened a file, like just viewed an image or viewed a PDF but haven't changed it, then it maybe further down the list. But you can always change the order here by clicking on these to sort differently.

Now we see a ton of stuff in here we probably don't want. Like these are things in the Library Folder. There might be other file types here that just don't make sense for you to view them, like folders for instance. So, I'm going to go up here again to the right of Kind is Any, hold Option down and click again to create another grouping. I'm going to set this to Any of the following are True as well and set it to Kind Is and then only show me documents. Now that might not be enough. I'm going to add another one and say Also Kind is, and I'm going to choose, Archive. Archive will show you zip files and things like that which you can see I have a few here. Especially if you're downloading things you may end up with archives not actual documents. This will give you a good selection of things you probably want to see here. But you can continue to add more Kind Is, like that. You can also add another one and go to Other. Then in the list search for extension and then add File Extension Is and then add a file extension to something that may be missing from this list, like docx for Word Files or something like that. Anything you notice that might be missing you can add to this. You can customize all this as you want. 

Now it is going to still look inside the MacMost Home Folder and give me all the results which may include a bunch of stuff that is inside the Library Folder. Hopefully, it won't be too much and this will be perfectly fine here. Let's Save this and I'm going to give it a name. I'm going to call it My Recents. It's going to save it in folder called Save Searches. Then we want to make sure we add the Sidebar right there. So now we have My Recents here in the Sidebar. I'll move it to the top of Favorites and I will get rid of Recents by dragging that away. So now I have My Recents which is sorted by date modified and includes things that have been modified or opened in the last ninety days. Something more useful to me than the default Recents List. 

Now if you ever want to modify this you can Control Click on this right here and then choose Show Search Criteria. Let's change this to be 30 days instead of 90 days just to make it a shorter list. Then Save and now it is saved and that is now the list that you'll get. Just 30 days instead. So you can continue to modify things to refine this to fit your needs. You can also create multiple ones. For instance you can have one that looks in your Documents Folder and another that looks, say, on an external drive and just have two of them here and just go to the one you want. 

But let's say that this still isn't good enough. You still don't like the fact that a few Library Folder items appear in her and you rather it just give you a list that is a combined search of several folders. Like say Documents, Desktop, and Downloads. Just show you the things in those three locations. Unfortunately you can't do that with a regular Search in the Finder or a Saved Search. You have to start with one location and then it looks for everything under that location. But you can hack the Saved Search and define multiple locations. So, I'm going to Control Click on My Recents here and choose Show an Enclosing Folder. This takes me to this Saved Search file inside of my Library. This is actually just a text file that defines the Saved Search. So I can Drag & Drop this to Text Edit to open it. Now you can see the whole definition of this Saved Search. So, you want to go and search for, inside this text document, FX scope. It is important you remember the FX because there are other things called Scope here. Look underneath that for FX Scope Array of Paths. You'll find an array and you'll find this one entry here which is the folder it's going to look into.

I'm going to select this line and Copy it and then Paste it two more times and then create three paths. Instead of looking in the Home Folder I'm going to do slash documents. Then for the next line slash desktop. Then for the next line slash downloads. Now we've told it to look in three different folders and combine the search results. I'll Save here and Close this and nothing is going to happen right away. If I go back to My Recents it won't update this. You have to go to the Finder icon in the Dock, hold both the Control and Option Keys down, that's Control not Command. Control and Option click and then choose Relaunch. It will relaunch the Finder, take a few seconds, and then you can go to My Recents. But now the results are all going to be in your Downloads Folder, in your Documents Folder, in the Desktop Folder. I don't have anything in Desktop but it is only going to look in those three places. Now you have a My Recents at specific locations, and you can go back and add more and edit the. The only problem still remains is that you can only sort by one thing at a time. So you have to choose by sorting by Date Modified or Date Last Opened. But Date Modified probably will work in most cases especially if you keep the number of files low by having it search only the most recent 30 or 90 days worth of files. 

So, the last solution is a bit of a hack, but it's worked for years and years. If that's too much for you don't worry about it. Just knowing how the Recents List works should help you out and the ability to create a simple Saved Search might allow you to put some more useful things in your left Sidebar under Favorites. 

Hope you found this useful. Thanks for watching.