Customize Your Mac Finder Sidebar

Boost your productivity by customizing your Finder sidebar. You can add the folders and locations you use the most and access them easily in the Finder, Open, Save and Upload dialogs.
Video Transcript: Hi, this is Gary with MacMost.com. Let's take a look at customizing your Finder Sidebar. 
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Now the Finder's sidebar is one of the most important tools that you will use to get around in the files and folders on your Mac and also to access them inside of apps. So it is really important to make sure that you spend some time customizing it to make sure the things you access the most are there. 
The Finder sidebar is what you see here on the left and there are four sections. The Favorites section, iCloud, Locations, Tags. So to customize this the place to start is to go to Finder, Settings, and then go to the Sidebar tab here. Then you're going to see each of these four sections represented here with a bunch of checkboxes. This is where you can turn On and Off some of these items. Let's start with the Favorites section. 
The Favorites section can include regular folders like, for instance, there's your Music folder, your Pictures folder, and your Downloads folder. But it can also include some special items. Like Recents and AirDrop. Recents is not a location at all but simply a list of your most recently opened files. AirDrop is a special option where you can quickly access other devices nearby to send a file to them. So you can send a file to your iPhone or just somebody else's Mac and so on. But the rest of these just represent locations. So, for instance, if I wanted to add my Pictures folder to the left sidebar I can just check this box and you can see how it is added there under Favorites. I can also remove something. So, for instance, if I don't find i'm  using AirDrop much I can remove it and it saves space there on the left.
Now if you're not using iCloud you're also going to see Desktop & Documents here under Favorites. But if you are using iCloud those two items will be here under iCloud and also a checkbox for the top level of iCloud Drive and a checkbox for things shared with you using iCloud Drive which again isn't a location. It is kind of like Recents. It just lists item that happen to be shared with you through iCloud Drive so you can see exactly what those are.
Now under Locations, this is talking more about physical locations like other hard drives, for instance. So you have the top level of your Mac here but you also have hard disks listing your Mac's hard drive and you can see that here as the second item. You have External Drives that you can list and also, for instance, network things like other Cloud storage services and other network computers. So you can easily turn these On and Off as well. Note that if you don't think you need to access these in the Finder's sidebar you can just turn all these off. So if you uncheck everything here not only does it empty out all of these but it removes the entire Location Section just as if you would turn everything in iCloud off here the entire iCloud Section would disappear. Now Tags you can check Recent Tags and it will automatically show you recently used tags here. We'll look at tags more in a minute. 
Now without using Finder Settings you can manipulate a lot of what is here just by doing it directly in the Sidebars. So for instance if you want to reorder things, like move Pictures above Downloads, you can just drag and drop like that. You can even move things between sections as long as it makes sense. So, for instance, you can move Documents up to Favorites out of iCloud Drive. It is still going to show you your Documents folder, which is in iCloud Drive in this case, you've just decided to put it under Favorites instead of iCloud. But, for instance, you couldn't move Pictures into iCloud because Pictures is a folder that's local to your hard drive. It's not part of iCloud so it doesn't make sense tone able to move it from Favorites down to iCloud. If you want to remove any item from here, like let's get rid of Pictures, I can either drag it away until you see a little x or I can Control Click, right click, two finger click on a trackpad on it right there and I can Remove from sidebar. 
Now note that each of these sections can actually be Closed and Opened. For instance Favorites here you can see this little button to the right. It only appears if I move the pointer over it. I can Close Favorites. So if you just see Favorites there and nothing under it and you know there should be something there simply click here to Open it up. 
Now let's look at Tags. I need to open up Tags here to see it. I had it closed before. I've got several Tags listed. Remember under Finder, Settings you can choose to have Recent Tags shown. So let's turn that Off and only have the Tags I want shown. To determine which Tags are shown go back into Finder, Settings but go to Tags and then the checkboxes here on the right determine which ones are shown. So you can see why Red, Orange, and Yellow are shown. If I want Blue to be shown I check that and you can see it appears there. So, of course, note that Tags are not a location. But there is something in the List file that have that tag. So if I select Red you can see all the files that have been tagged Red. So if I wanted to have something more useful, like a name like Work Projects or something like that, I could actually assign a tag to any file to have it appear here. I can go into my Documents folder, for instance, go here and let's go to this file and I can simply assign a tag, like Red, to it. Now new.txt has that tag so when I go to the Red tags here I'll see it there. So this is an easy way to access files in the sidebar even if they are in different locations. All of the files tagged with Red will be shown here even if they are in all sorts of different folders all over your hard drive. 
So how about adding your own custom folders to the sidebar. Well you certainly can do that and you should. If there is a folder you use very often simply drag that folder into the sidebar and stick it there. Don't drag it into something because that is indicating you want to move it into that location. But drag it between things. So I'll also move, say, this folder here right between these two. Remember, and this is very important, that these are not the actual folders. Notice here I've got the folder called Current. The folder called Current is actually in my Documents folder. This is a shortcut to it. It's not the actual folder. So, for instance, when I remove it from the sidebar it doesn't delete it from its location. It's still where it was. This is just a shortcut to quickly be able to jump to that folder. 
So I'll give you some tips here. I'm going to start off by saying you should not only add folders to the sidebar that you use all the time but don't be afraid to add or remove things on a regular basis. A lot of users want to simply get this to be perfect, something that they don't touch for years. But the best way to use this for productivity is don't be afraid to add a folder here, even if you're just going to be using it over the next few days and then remove it when you're done with that project. 
Another tip is that you can rearrange not only the items within a section but sections themselves. So, for instance, say I were to have my Documents folder inside of iCloud Drive and I wanted iCloud Drive Documents & Desktop, this whole section, to be at the top. I can actually drag iCloud to the top here to rearrange the order of the sections. 
As I mentioned before you can actually use these as Drop Zones. So, for instance, if I wanted to move something into one of these folders, and I can move this file into the current folder by dragging and dropping it into the sidebar and then if I go to Documents here and look under Current you could see that it has been moved there. 
My last tip is the most important one because it makes the Finder sidebar so much more useful than just moving files and folders around here in the Finder itself. When you're in an app, like I'm in Pages right here, if you go to Open A New File you'll get the Open File dialogue box. Notice that the Sidebar is here on the left. So, all of the items that you've added they are going to be there as well. Inside of the Current folder I can easily with one click jump right to that folder no matter where it is located. So this is why it is really important to have the actual folders you access all the time right here. The same thing is true for saving. If you go to Save a file notice the Sidebar is present there. So I can jump right to a specific folder as long as I've added it to my Favorites. 
Even when you go to upload a file, I'm using my example page here, if you click one of those choose a file buttons or choose an image to upload, notice the upload window here also shows your Favorites on the left. Note that if you don't actually see it here on the left you can easily bring it up. Note that in the Finder if you go to View there is a menu item for Show & Hide Sidebar. So I can actually have the Sidebar hidden in the Finder and the keyboard shortcut for that is Control Command S. That works in Open, Save, and Upload dialogues. So Control Command S you can see hides the sidebar and maybe you've accidentally done that and you can easily bring it back using Control Command S as well. 
Here's one bonus tip and that's for people that like the Recents List here. This just lists recent files. But maybe it's not exactly what you want. Maybe you just want to see Recent Presentations for example or Recent Pages Documents. You can create your own items like this that aren't locations but basically give you kind of search results here under Favorites. The way to do that is first do a search. Go to the location where you want to search. I want to go to the Documents folder. Instead of clicking here I'm going to do Command F to start a search. I'm going to set on my search. In this case the Kind Is Presentation. Note that the search area is set to Documents. So in my Documents folder kind is presentation. You can add other things as well. So, for instance, I can say that the Last Opened Date is within the last 365 days or one year just to see the recent stuff, not old things. I can see the results here. Now if I click Save I can save this as a Saved Search. It saves it in a special location in your Library. Let me give it a good name like Recent Presentations and then I'm going to make sure that the checkbox here for Add To Sidebar is there. If I do Save now I can see I've got Recent Presentations here. So I can be somewhere else and decide I want to go to see all my Recent Presentations and I've got this handy item here under Favorites that isn't a Location but is just a list of all or my recent presentations spread out throughout my entire Document's folder. You can go in and Control Click on this and remove it or you can show search criteria, for instance, and then update it so I can do 180 days and save it and now it's changed so it is only 180 days instead of 365. 
So even if you don't use these advanced tips just take the time to put your most commonly accessed folders under Favorites in your Sidebar. Remove items that you don't regularly go to and then you'll find it helps you get to the files that you need the most often. 
I hope you found this useful. Thanks for watching.
Comments: 6 Responses to “Customize Your Mac Finder Sidebar”

Keith Hill
2 months ago
Thanks so much for this informative Video today. I never knew you could change these finder sidebar items. I always thought, what you see is what you've got. Lesson learned. Thanks.
Stephane Dresler
So much valuable information. Thank you Gary!
Dahlia Klepac
Very helpful!! Thanks
Richard Schaffer
How do you add a new custom folder to sidebar?
Paul Raffaelli
Very helpful in filling in my understanding of the sidebar. As always great job.
Gary Rosenzweig
Paul: what do you mean by “custom?”
Customize Your Mac Finder Sidebar

Comments: 6 Responses to “Customize Your Mac Finder Sidebar”

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