Accessing Your Most Recently Opened Folders In the Finder

While it is easy to access recent files in the Finder, it is less convenient to look at your recent folders. But by adding a Smart Folder to the left sidebar you can easily get there.

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Video Transcript: Hi, this is Gary with MacMost.com. Let me show you different ways that you can access your most recently used folders on your Mac. 
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Now a question I'm often asked is how can you access recently used folders on your Mac. After all it is pretty easy to access recently used files. You just look in the left sidebar for Recents and then you get a list of them with the latest one first. If you don't see this by the way you can go to Finder Settings and then under Sidebar here make sure Recents is checked. This only shows you files, not Folders. Often we want to access the Folders we most recently used. After all we probably have a collection of files in there and an individual file may be something we didn't access recently but other ones are. So we want to basically go to that Folder instead. 
Now in the Finder there is a direct way to do this. If you go to the GO menu here there is Recent Folders. Under there you're going to find an alphabetical list of the ten most recently accessed folders. It's not as useful because it takes a few clicks to get here. It is sorted alphabetically instead of the most recently used at the top. Incidentally the reason there are ten here is because as a System Setting underneath Desktop & Dock you'll see Recent Documents, Applications & Servers and there is a number right here. 
So what if I wanted Recent Folders, not just Recents. Well in some instances we have that. For instance here in Pages if you go to Save A Document for the first time you get the Saved Dialogue and whether it is expanded like this or shrunk like that you're going to have his drop down menu here and you're going to find, a section called Recent Places. It will show you the five most recent places. Usually all Folders. But it could be, say, the top level of a drive too. These are sorted in the order you would expect and easy to access. But you only see five of them. It's only in the Saved Dialogue here or in the Open Dialogue you'll also see those. It would be nice to have the same functionality but in the Finder as well so while you're in the Finder you can get a list of your most recently accessed folders. 
So the way to add this to the Finder is actually to create a Smart Folder, also called a Saved Search, and put it in the left Sidebar. So we can do that by first going to the top level of where we want to have the search. So you may want to go to the top level of your whole Hard Drive. But more likely you probably want to go either to your Documents Folder and just look only in the Documents Folder or perhaps your Home Folder. Let's go to the Home Folder here and I'm going to do Command F for find and I'm not going to use this Search box here at the top at all. Instead I'm going to right to the criteria here and change Kind to Folder. It's going to show me only folders in that location. Then I'm going to hit the Plus button here and I'm going to change Name to Last Opened Date. If you don't see Last Opened Date you can always choose Other and find it there. You could say is within the last, say, 7 days. This will give you all the folders that you have opened in the last 7 days. Change this to whatever you want. If you want it to be one day make it that. If you want it to 14. 30, hour, what you want. 
So I'm in the Home folder here. Kind is Folder. Last Opened Date is within the last 7 days. Now I'm going to click the Save button and I'm going to give it a name. I'll call this Recent Folders. I'm going to Save it into Saved Searches folder which is a good place to put it so it is out of the way. But I am going to make sure that Add To Sidebar is checked here. Then I'm going to click Save. Now I've got Recent Folders here on the left. I'll drag it to the top. Maybe right under Recents so I have Recents for recent files and Recent Folders, my own creation, to show me all my recent folders. Now I can easily access it by just clicking here in the sidebar. Anytime I open a New Finder Window I just go to Recent Folders like that.  
Note if I have it in Column View it is really handy because I can actually view it like this. But the Sort Order is now alphabetical. But if I change to List View here then you could see Date Last Opened is now the default sort order. You can certainly change that but because I set it that way in the Smart Folder when I saved it that it will appear like this by default. So I get my top one at the top like that. Notice how it will change automatically. So, for instance, notice how Downloads is way down here. If I go to my Downloads folder and then go to Recents, Downloads is now at the top because it is more recently opened than any of these others. 
Now this also will work in Saved Dialogue. So if I go here to Pages and I go to Save notice in the left sidebar I have Recent Folders. I can select that. Now unfortunately this doesn't work in the Open Dialogue. If I go to File, Open and I go to Recent Folders I don't get anything there. Nothing will bring up the results of a Smart Folder in the Open Dialogue. Not sure why as it certainly would be handy. Recents certainly appears here. This is kind of a Smart Folder. But for some reason this Smart Folder won't work in the Open Dialogue.  Not really a huge problem as you can simply just use it here in the Finder and then, of course, when you see a folder you've recently gone to, go into it, double click on the file that you want to open and just open files always from the Finder rather than from inside of the app. Many of us do that already. 
You can also add this Folder to the Toolbar. By Control Clicking in the Toolbar, choosing Customize Toolbar and then one of the things you can do is Open up a New Finder Window. Then you want to Control Click on Recent Folders and Show In Enclosing Folder. Then you get this Saved Search right there. Drag that into the Toolbar here. So you can see where it appears there. So now I click Done there to stop customizing. Anytime I want to get to Recent Folders I can click there and it jumps to it. That makes it, maybe, stand out as something a little different than all of the rest of the things have under Favorites in the left Sidebar. 
So there is some useful techniques to quickly get to your most recently opened folders on your Mac. Hope you found this useful. Thanks for watching.

Comments: 2 Responses to “Accessing Your Most Recently Opened Folders In the Finder”

Robert Rutledge

1 year ago

This is useful but I find Default Folder X supplies this functionality and way more across all applications and scenarios. It is a modest investment which pays for itself in productivity.

Steve

Recent Folders doesn't quite work for me as expected. I open Recent Folders, and nothing appears there unless I open a new Finder window. Then as I open folders in the new window, they start to appear in the Recent Folders window. But then when I close the Recent Folders window, all the entries disappear and do not appear when I reopen it.

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Accessing Your Most Recently Opened Folders In the Finder

Comments: 2 Responses to “Accessing Your Most Recently Opened Folders In the Finder”

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