Live: How To Organize Files On Your Mac

Hi everyone, this is Gary with MacMost.com and today let's take a look in the special live episode at some advice on how to organize the files on your Mac.

So this is something that people like me get asked all the time.

Somebody's either new to the Mac or maybe they've been using Mac for years, but they maybe start paying more attention to how they're organizing their files.

And they ask, how should I be organizing the files and folders and things on my Mac? And unlike a lot of my other tutorials, this isn't really something you can answer with like, here's the problem and here's how you're supposed to do it.

And maybe some options and some alternatives.

This is more of an advice thing because you can really organize the files and folders in many different ways.

And it's more like preference and how you like to do things and how you like to work.

But if a friend was coming to me and saying, hey, I want your advice on how I should be organizing things on my Mac, this is basically what I tell them.

And if it's not what you want to do or how you do it, that's fine.

but maybe there might be some other tips or things to think about for you in here.

So let's go and take a look here at my screen.

And here I am just with a simple finder window.

And let's go up to the top level here just to get our bearings on where we are.

So I'm going to go to the home or let's go to the computer level.

sorry computer level so this is my top level my computer and here you should see your hard drive which is probably called macintosh hd and you will see any external drives you got connected i've got two and network so this gets our bearings here this is your internal drive let's dive down into that then you should see applications library system and users under there now back in the like 1980s 1990s you may have put files here at the top level of your hard drive but that's definitely not a good idea to do now.

As a matter of fact, it's very hard to do.

In fact, you want to keep going down into the users folder, and this shows you the users on your Mac.

So what you've got here is you've got your home folder, which in this case is this, and you can see the little home icon there.

It's hard to see, but you could see there's a little icon there as opposed to these other plain looking folders.

I actually have several other user accounts, my main one that I actually really get work done with.

And then some demo accounts here.

And this is my main demo account, which is what I'm using right now.

So, and you also see shared.

But you probably just see shared and you'll just see your home folder.

If you just have the one user account, that's fine.

You want to keep going down because you're still not where at the level where you want to put your files.

This is the user's folder.

If you go down here, now you're in your home folder.

Now you're at a place where you can start organizing your stuff.

So you're going to see a variety of things here.

Everybody should see movies, music, pictures, for instance.

Probably other things like downloads, probably applications as well, probably public as well, but definitely these three right here.

Now, here's the thing.

You probably, or you may be wondering why you don't see two folders that you may have heard about and may know very well, desktop and documents.

They're not here in my home folder because they're in iCloud Drive.

There are two options you've got when you've got your Mac set up, and that is to be using iCloud Drive for desktop and documents folders or not.

The setting for that is in system settings, and then you go down into iCloud and then Drive, and then here's desktop and documents folders.

I've got that turned on, and that's what I recommend because iCloud Drive is fantastic for having your files available across your devices.

Very few of us just have one device, like a computer, and that's it.

Most of us at least have a phone.

Most of us may have something else too, like an iPad or a second Mac, like an older Mac or a laptop or whatever.

So having this turned on means everything in desktop and documents is synced across all those devices.

Even if you don't use it on a regular basis, it's great to be able to actually see your documents, anything in your documents folder without having to think about it, but on your iPhone.

So maybe that one time that you're somewhere else and you only have your iPhone with you, you can look in the Files app in Documents and there is all of your stuff that's on your Mac.

You can access it.

So I've got that turned on and that's how I recommend people do it.

Not everybody will want desktop and documents at iCloud Drive, but I'm going to go with that as like kind of the, you know, way I'm advising how to do things.

So you're not going to see desktop and documents here.

Instead, you're going to go in locations here in the left sidebar, or you can use the Go menu and you can go to iCloud Drive.

And this is the top level iCloud Drive.

iCloud Drive is like another drive.

You've got your Macintosh HD and you've got iCloud Drive, two separate drives.

And this is where the desktop folder and the documents folder are because I have that check box, that switch in system settings saying that they are here, not in my home folder.

But I still access them by just going to documents or going to desktop.

So I've got a bunch of other stuff here in iCloud Drive.

Applications like to create folders at the top level of iCloud Drive, and it clutters things up here, which I know a lot of people don't like.

But my advice on how to organize things is going to actually make that irrelevant.

So you've got this.

The other thing about iCloud Drive that's really important is it kind of works like a backup.

It's not a backup.

Backups are more complex.

They have versions.

You can delete a file and then recover the deleted file.

You can't really do that with iCloud Drive, but what iCloud Drive does that's great, that really makes it kind of like a backup, is your MacBook could be stolen, your Mac Mini could break, or there could be some sort of disaster where it's destroyed, or you could drop your computer and it breaks, or whatever happens.

If your files are in iCloud Drive, you get your new Mac, You log on to iCloud Drive and all your files are there.

That's it.

Done.

Whereas if you don't use iCloud Drive, then you're relying on your own backup to get those files back and do a whole process to get those files back.

iCloud Drive makes it easy.

Matter of fact, it makes it easy even when you do that on purpose.

By that, I mean like you get a new Mac because you want to get a new Mac and then you just log in to the new Mac with iCloud Drive and all your files are there.

You're done.

It's like moving to a new Mac just takes minutes.

It's not a whole big deal.

Anyway, however you do it, whether desktop and documents is here in iCloud Drive or whether it's in your home folder, the way I recommend organizing your files is to use your documents folder for everything.

And I use my desktop folder for nothing.

Notice there's nothing here on the desktop.

And actually, if you look in here, it's empty, right? There's nothing in here.

Now, that doesn't mean it's not a valid way to actually have stuff on the desktop.

And I'll talk about that in a minute.

But the documents folder is kind of like your place to put files and to do whatever you want.

You go into your documents folder, whether it's iCloud Drive or your home folder, this is where you can create your organizational structure, which is going to be different for everyone.

So under your documents folder, create folders, file, new folder, as much as you want.

Some people may have four folders in here.

Some people may have 150 folders in here.

whatever fits your style, whatever fits what you do for work, you can do in here and you can change it all the time.

You could have 150 folders in here and then one day decide you're going to clean everything up and group them together inside of subfolders and that have four folders and then you could take stuff out.

You could change it all the time if you want.

It really is personal preference.

I like using the documents folder as your primary level for everything, but you can organize any way you like under here, whatever fits your style, whatever fits the kind of work you do.

And remember folders inside of folders, it's important to be able to do that.

So for instance, like, you know, this has a lot of demo stuff in it, right? But I actually do have a projects folder in my real documents folder, in my real account.

And my projects folder is where I come up with an idea.

They create something, whether it's a game or a website or maybe a presentation or something I want to make.

I go into the project folder.

I create a file in here, or I create a new folder here with the name of the project.

And I put all the stuff in there.

And it's really easy to say, oh, that was a project.

It's in here.

And you can create all sorts of stuff.

Personal folder, have a folder for like personal documents, have a folder for business documents, have a folder for you know, taxes, have a folder for your home, right? You know, the stuff having to do with their home, appliances, insurance, all that stuff.

However you want to organize, put it all in the documents folder and just always be kind of revising and thinking about how you're using it.

And are you getting the most out of it and keep organizing things like that.

Now, if you want to do some of that on the desktop instead, that's fine.

The desktop and documents folder basically are the same thing, except one, the desktop folder, actually will show you all of the subfolders and files will actually appear on your desktop.

So if you had this much stuff on your desktop, it gets crowded.

But not everybody has this much stuff.

You may have three folders.

You may have three folders, two files, right? And that's it.

And you may like the whole metaphor of a desktop and having your files just available here on the desktop.

And in that case, then yeah, put the stuff in your desktop folder and it will appear here.

Like I'll, let's go here to my home folder or sorry, let's go to iCloud Drive.

Let's go to documents.

And like, I just moved my projects folder to the desktop and there it is.

It's like there.

And I can move, say my business stuff.

to there.

So I've got like my folders available here and maybe an extra file.

And maybe I like the metaphor of everything being like here available to me without opening a finder window.

You know, that's fine.

So it's up to you.

I don't like a clutter desktop, but I could see the point.

I could see why some people may want to have things available there.

While we're here taking a look at like things in the Finder here, it's worth noting that a lot of your organization revolves around like how you like to view things.

And there are two, well, actually four different views.

You know, you've got your icon view and you've got your gallery view.

But I think the main view is for really getting worked on or organizing things are list view, which I like to use in column view, which a lot of people like to so uh if you know i give you an idea why i like list view list view is great because you could open up multiple locations like i can open up the uh daily reports folder here and i can open up this subfolder that i don't have anything in there i can open up my projects folder and i can go down and open up you know this project right here and i can actually drag items from like one folder down into another folder.

Like it's limitless in terms of, you know, if you're at the main level, the documents level here, and everything's organized under documents, you can kind of see exactly what you want to see as deep as you want in one big list.

Now, column view is really nice because you could, you know, very quickly navigate through your different folders here and look deep down into them.

But you only can look at really contents of one folder at a time.

You know, you don't see the contents of these folders as well.

And also you don't get all of that information that you get here, like size, kind, dates, things like that, because you don't have the columns, right? So I prefer ListView, but in the past I've used ColumnView a lot.

So if I know a lot of people like ColumnView, that's perfectly fine.

But I would definitely say if somebody's asking me for advice, list view or column view.

Use both of them.

Get to know both of them.

They're both very useful.

And when you have everything organized under documents, having it in either list or column view is a great way to navigate through things.

So let me take a look at some questions here before I continue on to the next thing.

Somebody's saying that they've never been trusting of iCloud Drive's syncing ability.

That's a good question.

I was going to talk about that later, but I'll bring that up.

But even if it doesn't sync well for you, like your internet connections, iffy or something like that, I mean, it's still local, right? And you can get the best of both worlds.

Because if you're not using iCloud Drive, then everything is stored locally.

And then it's the equivalent to having the optimized Mac storage here turned off.

and if you have optimized max storage turned off, there's no reason not to have it syncing to iCloud Drive as well, right? Because you have enough room on your local drive for everything.

Otherwise, you wouldn't have this turned off.

The whole point of having this turned on is you don't have enough local storage.

But if you have enough local storage, you have this turned off, which is what I do for my main account.

And then iCloud Drive should sync.

But if it's not syncing, then you're no worse off than if you weren't using iCloud Drive in the first place.

And hopefully you could figure out whatever syncing problems you had.

Somebody said they've started posting videos to YouTube.

Where do they keep it? Well, I'm going to talk about local storage in a minute and I'll address the whole idea of creating large things like YouTube videos and how that works for the iCloud Drive or how it doesn't work.

Now, somebody pointed out that sometimes some apps create folders here in your documents folder in iCloud Drive.

I hate that.

They shouldn't do that.

You should complain to the software developers.

I don't care if they're big ones like Adobe or small ones, but they should let you customize where their stuff goes.

In most cases, they will put stuff at the top level of iCloud Drive, like all of these apps that you see here, and leave your documents folder alone.

but if you you know if they're here that's fine and if you want to just have like okay i'm going to leave this alone and create like a like i did here for projects just have everything under projects or everything under my my documents or something like that that's fine too if you like that is it not a concern to put content in icloud or about a data leak remember everything in icloud encrypted end to end.

Your files are all encrypted end to end.

So no, I'm not worried about that.

I'm much, from a security standpoint, I'm much more worried about losing my files or not having access to my files when I want access to them than actually somebody putting like, you know, incredible amount of power and work behind trying to decrypt my files, if it's even possible to do.

They're encrypted.

Somebody could break into your iCloud account and they're just encrypted files, right? So, yeah, it's all behind, like, your password and your two-factor authentication or PASCII to getting your iCloud Drive stuff.

It's encrypted.

And the pictures folder's not in iCloud? Yes, I'm going to talk about the pictures folder here in a minute.

Um...

So, and also somebody said, can we turn off iCloud syncing? And well, of course you could just not use iCloud at all, but I think what you want is probably to maybe customize it per folder, which I'm also going to talk about in a minute.

So let's get to some more stuff.

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So let's take a look at some more stuff.

Once you've got a system worked out, let's say you take my advice and put everything in your documents folder.

One of the things you want to do is have your documents folder in your favorites here on the left.

If it's not there, let me drag it out.

An easy way to get it back is go to find your settings and go to sidebar.

And here you could say, yeah, put my documents folder here in favorites.

You can say, put my desktop folder there if you want as well.

But you could also add other folders.

So like that projects folder, if that's like the one you're going to all the time to do work, you can drag that one over to the favorite section here and you can add that.

Now you have a quick way to get into your projects folder or get back to your documents folder.

And this not only appears here, but like I'm going to launch, let's launch numbers here.

Let's see what apps, what documents I've got open in numbers.

Hopefully nothing.

And it appears in like open dialogues for things.

So like here in numbers, if I go to file open, note the sidebar is the same.

So since I put projects in the sidebar, look how easy I can get to projects.

when I open and when I save because it's the sidebar.

So you're going to want to, after organizing your files, put the ones you use the most, just a few of them here in favorites.

And remember, it's easy to change these.

If you're working one day on, say, you know, I don't know, a certain thing like a personal stuff, you can put personal over here, keep it there for the day, and then drag it out just to, you know, limit the number of things here.

It's easy to add, easy to remove.

Another thing is if you go to settings and you go to general, you've got the setting here for new finder window show.

So you could set this to a lot of different things.

If you're organizing your documents like I am, I've got it set to documents.

So when I create a new finder window, it's right where I want it to be.

But you could choose other and you could say, choose the projects folder as the default folder for where you start when you get to create a new Finder window or tab for that matter.

Now, there was a question before about iCloud Drive.

So I've got this set to basically optimize my storage.

So this is how you would typically do it.

Say if you had a terabyte of files, but you only had a half a terabyte drive on your Mac, right? So you're storing most of the, everything stored in iCloud Drive at Apple servers in iCloud Drive, but only some of the stuff, the stuff that you've accessed recently is on your local drive, cached kind of, just like a browser cache.

You've got a file cache of the files you're using at the moment or recently.

And you could see here this little symbol, the little cloud with the down arrow saying, hey, some of the stuff in this folder is local.

Some of the stuff isn't.

Now, when I access a file, like let me double click on this example, document here and it actually opens up in another on another screen there but there it is notice that it downloaded it instantly and it's a tiny file so it was able to do it very quick I didn't even notice that it wasn't cached locally but now it'll be cached locally for a while because it knows I just used it but if I wanted to make sure this file stayed local stayed cached all I need to do is ctrl click right click or two finger click on it and I've got keep downloaded here and now I just told the finder, hey, keep this file around.

Do not get rid of it, even if I don't access it for a month, two months, three months.

Keep it around.

If I get on an airplane and I'm completely off network, this file will be available locally because I told it I wanted it.

I could do the same thing for a folder.

I could say, keep everything in this folder downloaded.

Now, obviously, you don't want to do this for all of your folders.

If you want that, then you just want to turn off the optimized feature.

But if there's just a couple folders, a couple important documents, use keep downloaded.

But when you do that, and you've got something, let's go here to like, let's go to this little file, open this file up here.

And that also opens up another window.

But you could see here, I've got that's downloaded now.

And maybe this is a huge file, right? I'm like, oh, I'm now I'm short on space.

You can also say remove download.

And that basically tells it, hey, right away, get rid of the cached version of this file.

I'm not going to need it for a while.

So you have the ability to go back and forth and say which files are important to you and which files aren't, which folders are important to you and which files aren't.

So you can do that.

You don't have to use optimize for everything.

You can use that to kind of customize things.

And the next thing is, okay, but what if you just want stuff that's local? Like you've got your documents folder.

If I command click here, you can see documents is an icon drive.

Great.

I want local stuff.

Now this goes back to the question somebody had about YouTube videos, creating YouTube videos or creating any video projects, maybe just, you know, video projects just for fun.

You've got these big files here and they're going to take a lot of space and you're never really going to want to access them somewhere else.

Right.

So remember, you've got your home folder.

We go home here and desktop isn't here anymore.

Documents isn't here anymore, but these other folders are.

So like, for instance, you've got your movies folder here and there's a bunch of stuff in the movies folder.

And this is where like by default, iMovie is going to want to keep stuff.

You also have other stuff like your music folder.

This is where by default, the music app, GarageBand and other audio apps are going to want to keep stuff.

Pictures.

This is where your photos libraries and other photos apps will want to keep stuff.

These are local only.

Anything in your home folder you could see here goes up to the hard drive level.

This is not an iCloud drive.

You can create your own folders in here.

Now, you could technically create a documents folder here and have two documents folders.

It's confusing, though.

So I prefer, and I advise other people to do it, to create it and call it local documents or, you know, whatever you want to call it, but not documents because then sometimes it'll be hard to tell which documents folder you're accessing.

But this documents folder here has stuff and this documents folder is on my hard drive in the user's folder or my home folder, not my hard drive.

So if you're creating big video projects, you could use, say, the existing movies folder to put your iMovie library, create it in there.

or if you're using some other app, you know, DaVinci Resolve or whatever it is, you could put your projects in movies.

You can create a local documents folder, put your projects in there and use your home folder or a local documents folder you create in your own folder to store stuff that will not be part of iCloud Drive, that will be local only.

And this is really useful for things like video projects.

It's exactly what I do.

In fact, my project files for my MacMost videos huge and they are just stored locally on my Mac.

I don't put them in iCloud Drive.

The supporting files and all like the MacBose stuff I've got, that's all in iCloud Drive.

All the rest of the stuff's in iCloud Drive.

The actual video recording files and editing files, they're just on my local drive.

I actually have them in my movies folder, but I could probably just create in my own folder a like MacMost video folder and put it all in there.

So it's useful to know that technique.

And when people ask me, well, I'm using iCloud Drive, but I want stuff that's local only.

And how do I take this folder and make it local only? Well, you don't.

This folder is an iCloud Drive.

You don't make this one local only.

It's impossible because it's an iCloud Drive and you don't want to do that.

What you want to do is you want to go into your home folder, create something like local documents, put the stuff in there you want to be local only.

If you want, add that to the sidebar here.

Now I've got my iCloud Drive documents, and then maybe I've got a few things in my local only documents folder here.

I can go back and forth between these as I like and have access to them and open and save dialogues and all of that.

So that's really useful.

And I think the last thing I want to talk about is archiving, because I think it's an important part of this is, so you're doing all this stuff, you're organizing your files, but sometimes files are, you're done with them.

Like you've done a project.

Maybe it's a big thing at work.

You created a presentation, you're done.

You're not going to be using those files again, probably ever.

So what do you do with those? Because you don't want to delete them just because you're not going to use them forever.

doesn't mean you want to eradicate them for the pace of the earth.

You may want to save them, right? So what I've got for that, and what I think other people should do too, is of course, I've got an archive drive.

This is an external drive.

And the external drive is just basically, and I've got a few things in here.

I've broken it up into like MacMost archives, archives, backups of stuff, server stuff for me.

Personal media, so really big files like old home movies and stuff I've got on here.

And stock media, like I purchased like clip art like years and years ago.

So that's like takes up a lot of space.

And I don't want that MyCloud drive or my local drive because I rarely access it.

But I put that all here in this archive drive.

I bought an external drive.

I have that connected to my Mac since it's a desktop Mac, but you could occasionally connect it to like a MacBook.

And what happens is when I'm done with a project, let's go into projects here.

Let's say that this project here, Project Alpha, Project Alpha is long done, finished with it, something for work.

It was deployed.

It's finished.

It's taking up a lot of space.

I'm never going to use it again, but I want to keep the files around in case like I want to reuse something or refer to it.

I will just move that to my archive drive here.

And that way I clear it off.

It's not on my Mac anymore, not on the internal drive.

It's not part of iCloud drive, but I've got it archived.

And I think that's an important part of it.

Maybe you don't have enough stuff to warrant that.

Maybe most of the stuff you do is online and you don't accumulate large files like I do.

But if you do, an archive drive, I think is an important part of that process.

Everything kind of eventually ends up archive drive when I'm completely done with it.

And I rarely ever go to the archive drive and actually get something off of it, but it happens every once in a while.

So it's a useful technique to use.

So let me just check to see if there are any final questions here.

There's been a lot of questions in this, so I haven't been able to get to them all, but this video will remain up for a while, this actually permanently here at YouTube.

So ask any questions I don't get to in comments and I'll be happy to answer them there.

Somebody says, where's your home folder in the sidebar? Well, if you want your home folder to be in the sidebar, you can do that.

So you can go to the sidebar here and trying to remember, yeah, you can go and say under locations, put your home folder.

You could put it there, but you could also, you know, just go to your, go one level up from your home folder, user, users folder, and then drag it over and put it in favorites.

So you can this any way you want.

But it's a good question.

You should customize it and always be looking to improve on it.

And somebody says they have an external drive.

Basically, everything goes in the external drive and the computer drive is half empty.

And that's definitely a valid way to organize things.

And it's definitely, you know, it's what I said at the beginning, this is all kind of advice, but there's, you know, you don't need to organize this way.

And definitely if you've got a desktop setup, you're not on a MacBook and you've got an external drive that's always connected and you want to put everything there, that's great.

One of the downsides of that is of course, you can't use iCloud.

iCloud Drive's always internal, right? So you would basically instead, You would have iCloud Drive and maybe your documents folder in iCloud Drive.

And then instead of your home folder, local documents like I showed, you've got an external drive like this, and then you put your stuff there.

So that's a valid way if you like to do it that way.

So it says when you say files are encrypted, which password is required to access it? The MacBook or Apple password? Well, either one, because obviously you can access it with your Apple ID, your Apple account password.

That's how you get to it by going to say, you know, iCloud.com.

But on your Mac, your Mac has that password stored as part of your user account.

So it asks you to authenticate with your user account.

You log into your user account.

And now, because I'm logged into my user account here, I go to iCloud Drive, I can access everything.

But if I were to log out here or even lock the screen, then I need to re-authenticate with my local Mac account password, which gives the local account access to iCloud, to the iCloud account that is hooked into this local Mac account.

So you don't have to really worry about it.

It's all taken care of for you.

is your drive a NAS? No, my drive, oh, you mean this archive? No, just a standard drive.

So this is just connected directly to my Mac studio since it's a desktop.

There's really no reason to use a NAS and to slow things down over Wi-Fi.

But if I was using a MacBook and I was always moving around and couldn't have it connected, then maybe I would use a NAS, a network storage device.

So yeah, so hopefully that answers a lot of questions for you.

But as I said, ask any other questions you may have in the comments for this video that I'll leave up.

And, you know, I hope you have found this useful.

Thanks for watching.