MacMost Now 695: Spring-Loaded Folders

Spring-loaded folders are a part of OS X that many people may not know about or use often. You can drag and drop files onto folders and the folders will open for you to continue to place the file in the place you want. This lets you drag items in the Finder without first needing to set up a destination.

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Video Transcript: Hi. This is Gary with MacMost Now. On today's episode let's take a look at Spring-Loaded Folders. So Spring-Loaded Folders is a term you may have heard, but maybe you haven't actually tried to use them. Or, maybe you have been using them all along but haven't even realized it. The idea is that you can drag and drop something onto a folder that's not even present on the screen at the time you start the drag. You can drag over a folder and wait about a second and the folder will open automatically. It will spring open. And then you can put the file inside of that. And a matter of fact, you can actually navigate your entire file system pretty much using Spring-Loaded Folders. So it means you can drag and drop something without having to set it up first. Getting the right folder open on the right part of the screen to complete the action. So let me show you a simple example. I've got a finder window open here and it's set to column view, which is what I prefer. I've got a photo here and I want to put it into a folder I can't even see right now. I can start the drag and bring it up into the window here and I can drop it right here into my documents folder. But I can also hover over a folder, say, My Project, and it will open up. You can see now it appears here and I can drop it in there. I can continue and drop it, drag it over here and now it opens that up. Over here and it opens that up. And I can drop it all the way down in there inside that folder,the Media folder, in the Photos folder. And I dropped it in there with just one action, without having to go to this photos folder first. And this also works perfectly fine in other views, like the Icon view. I can drag it over to My Project, and Media and then Photos and drop it in there. I can even use the side bar for it. So I can, say we're looking at all my files, and I can drag over to MacMost, and then into Documents, and then continue on down and drop it in. And I've got a few options if you go to Finder Preferences you can see that you've got the ability to turn on and off Spring-Loaded Folders and set the delay amount. So you can set it to short or very long. Um, let's change it to very long and then we can see here that we can use the space bar to speed things up a bit. So I can go into My Project and wait and it will go in and in My Media you can see how it takes about a second to operate. But if I use the space bar, go over and immediately jump into the folder. So Spring-Loaded Folders is just a simple part of Mac OS10. Once you realize it's there and you start using it, it just becomes very natural. You can use it to drag files and folders around and just make navigating the Finder much easier. Until next time, this is Gary with MacMost Now.

Comments: 2 Responses to “MacMost Now 695: Spring-Loaded Folders”

roberta

13 years ago

Thank you for this and all your great teaching that has made having Mac products more bearable.

Raj

really helpful , i used to play with folders many times to arrange documents,photos etc, didn't knew about these that i can drag files into folders like that...thanks for sharing this video....

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MacMost Now 695: Spring-Loaded Folders

Comments: 2 Responses to “MacMost Now 695: Spring-Loaded Folders”

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