Live: Mac Finder Views and View Options

Hi everyone, this is Gary with MacMost.com and in this live episode Let's take a look at the four different finder views and I can show you all sorts of different tips and tricks for using the finder Okay, so finder views of course are the four different uses you use in a finder window Icon view, list view, column view and gallery view and each have unique properties There isn't one that's like the simple view and another that's more complex view each one has kind of like Just use it simply or use it complexly or however you want to do it.

Let's take a look at the four views here So I've got a finder window open just pointing at a regular folder with some stuff in it.

I've got Icon view here and you could see here in the toolbar the four views if the window is small enough this compresses into a single button and you have to click it to select the view and you can see the names there.

If it's wide enough if you have enough room then you get these as four buttons.

You could also go to the view menu and the very first things you see here the four things you see are the four views icons, list, columns, and gallery and keyboard shortcuts command one two three and four.

So you can switch between these views when looking at a folder or location in your files.

So icon view, list view, column view, and gallery view.

And each one of these has strengths and weaknesses.

Icon view is of course the classic view for looking at your files.

Everything's a big icon.

It's a two-dimensional space and it works really well if you're geographically minded.

You want things to be in a spot.

You know, you look at the things as you like in a 2D space.

ListView presents everything in a list here and it's great for when sorting is a priority.

You see things are sorted here by name and we'll get sorting in a minute and when you want to have lots of information like I've got date modified size and kind for each thing everything is in one row.

It's kind of like a spreadsheet view of your files and a lot of people could myself really like this.

ColumnView is interesting and And then it looks a little bit like ListView, but you don't get all the details there.

You can still sort, and when you look at another location inside one, like a folder inside another folder, you will get another column that shows you the contents of that folder.

And if you've got a folder in there, you can click on that and get yet another column.

So you get this kind of, some people call it kind of a tree view, although the metaphor is kind of lost when it's going horizontally like this.

but you can dive down into folder.

So you can see this graphic.png is in this folder, and this folder is in this folder.

And this is the top level here that you're looking at.

So that's column view.

Gallery view is a specialized view that shows you a really large preview or whatever file is selected.

And then a horizontal list at the bottom of all the files.

It's excellent for looking at a folder that's filled with things that you want to see previews for like images or PDFs perhaps, and you just want to be able to kind of go through them in a linear fashion to look at them all.

So let's start off in addition to looking at the different ways that these look and stuff is looking at like selecting files and navigating around in here.

If you want to go in icon view down a level into a folder, you would double click on that click on this one here to go down into it.

To go back up you can use go and enclosing folder or command up.

You can also command click here and then go up a level again like that and that actually opened up another tab there the way I had it set.

So that's icon view.

Double click to go down into a folder.

List view, you can do the same.

You can double click on a folder to dive down into it.

But you could also reveal the contents of the folder like that.

So I can reveal the contents here of each of these folders and even reveal further.

So you can have the, it's kind of unique for ListView to be able to view, say, files in one folder and files in another folder at the same time.

So you can do that as an alternative to diving down into the folder.

Column view, of course, it's all about being able to view the contents of other folders, diving down into it using that.

Gallery view just works like icon view.

If you go here, let's go up to this level here and go to gallery view.

If I wanted to go into this folder, or let's say this folder, I would just double click and go down into it.

The back button, by the way, goes back to your previous location, which sometimes is the same as going up a level.

Sometimes it's different.

Like if I go to local documents here and back to that back goes to local documents, even though that's not what's above demo.

So you get the idea there.

Another thing about looking at different views is how you select files.

So in icon view, you can select a single file, or I just played that sound there, sorry.

Select that file, you can click select another one, select that like you would you want to select multiple things, you can hold the command key down and select multiple things like that.

If you hold the shift key down, it does the same but we'll see shift and command are different in other views.

You can also drag a rectangle around to select multiple items, something unique for icon view and you can use shift or command in conjunction with that so I I can select all of those, then I can command click this one to add it.

And then Shift drag to select these three to add those.

I can command click this to deselect it.

Though you can do a lot in combination there.

ListView is different.

ListView, you can use a single click to select something, but you can command click to select multiple files.

Shift click works different by click one file and then shift click another.

It's going to select the range.

So in icon view, shift and command work the same in list view.

Shift is for a range and then command click adds or removes from what you have selected already.

And the same is true in the list view here, sorry, column view.

Select with command, shift, click to select a range and you can continue to modify if you hold the command key down, but a single click will just clear the selection and select that.

By the way, a great way if you ever need to select everything is command A for select all.

That works everywhere.

So like list view here, select all, column icon view, select all with command A.

So there we've got that.

Gallery view is pretty simple here because it's just a horizontal list.

It's kind of a one-dimensional list here as opposed to the 2D list of icon view.

You just have this, you could do shift click to select a range, command click to modify that or a single click, we'll select a single item there.

So selection is really interesting.

Now sorting is another aspect of this.

The obvious place to go if you really want to rely on sorting is to go to list view 'cause list view is really very much about sorting.

List view is really about two things, sorting and seeing details of files.

When you're in ListView, you've got these headers here, in this case, name, date modified, size, and kind.

And I can click on any one of those, and it will sort by that column.

A second click will reverse the sort.

So this is the oldest first and the newest last.

And you can see the little arrow there pointing in that direction.

If I were to click again, it reverses that.

And you can see the arrow here points.

Same thing with size, click in different directions or kind.

and then you can go to name and sort in either direction.

You can add more columns by control clicking here in any of these columns, and then you could put check mark next to one you want.

So if you want date created, you could add that.

I can remove date created like that.

I could click and drag the little line between columns there.

And yeah, that's a just really easy way.

You can modify and sort any way you want here.

Also under view, sort by, we're gonna look at later, you can select that to sort by.

Matter of fact, if you go to another view, like let's say column view here, there's nothing to click on on the top to sort, but if you go to view, sort by, I can sort by say the kind here instead.

Select it there, kind, there.

And you can see all the folders are first, there's some JPEGs and everything, it's grouping everything together, all the text files are last and all that.

I can do sort by last modified.

And I don't see the last modified dates there, but at least it's sorting by them.

I can go back to name there, sort by name.

The same thing in icon view here.

If you go view, sort by, you can sort by any one of these things.

So I can sort by kind and we'll re-sort everything by kind.

And it's kind of interesting in icon view, because if you have sorting on, then you can't really move things around.

They just snap back because you've said, hey, I want things sorted here.

But if you go and turn sort by off, then you can move these wherever you want.

So that's the two-dimensional nature of this.

So I can gather things together and put them like this.

Well, I would never do this, but people do this and group them like this, and that's the view.

And it remembers your location here.

If I go say view and let's see view sort by, and you can see their keyboard shortcuts for all of this, say sort by name, it's going to put it like this and it'll even readjust as I change the window size.

But if I then say no view sort by none, it remembers the locations that I placed everything.

So you have like the best of both worlds, sorting when you want and then kind of manual placement when you want.

You can also do snap to grid, and what snap to grid does is when you drag something, it's going to snap it to a grid.

So everything, instead of being placed kind of willy-nilly, it's going to be grid-like like that.

Whereas if I say snap to grid off, then you can see I can kind of modify these things.

Did I turn snap to grid off? Sort by snap to grid.

I did not.

Oh, sort by none there.

So no snap to grid.

Now, you can see I can do that.

And then view, snap to grid is going to snap there.

And you can see that one was getting in the way.

I had to move it over and all of that.

So, you know, if you want neatness, but you also want to be able to arrange things with gaps and stuff, then snap to grid is for you.

But you could also do a temporary cleanup.

Let's say, oh, I want to be able to place these where I want.

But let's start by cleaning everything up.

So what cleanup will do first is it's gonna snap everything to a grid like that.

But cleanup by will actually sort everything, but just right now.

So I can sort by name just right now and the sort is over.

So now I can rearrange things as I want.

And then I could say, you know, clean up by, sorry, clean up by if I misspoke there, clean up by, you know, whatever you want, of size like that, for instance, or you clean up by name like that.

It's a temporary thing as opposed to sort by, which is permanent and means that you can't rearrange things because it's always going to stay sorted.

So yeah, you've got a lot of options there.

Whereas for list view and column view, you're just setting sort by.

Now there's also the idea of using a range.

So we've got view and then use groups.

So if you say, okay, I'm going to use groups, then it's going to group things by, and then you get this group by only after you turn on use groups.

You could say group by kind, application, shared by, date last open.

Like if I do date last open, it's today, previous 30 days, 2025, and much earlier.

If I turn off use groups, it goes back to the normal view.

The use groups works in icon view as well.

So I know I can group by say size like that.

You also have it in the toolbar here.

You can click here and say turn off group by or turn it on using one of these things like that.

Column view has this as well.

So I can say group by kind like that and sorting still works.

So I could say group like this, but I don't think it works in column view.

I think if we go to list view, I know if you, this is the groupings, but if you option click, then it's sorting.

So I could say sorting by size, or you can click one of these here.

I can sort by size, so now inside each individual group, It's going to be sorted by size as opposed to sorted by the name here.

So yeah, that's useful.

I don't really use group by, but I know some people do like it and can be useful in various ways.

And it works in column view as well, group by kind like that.

And then in each folder here, it'll do the grouping as well, like that.

So that's kind of useful.

I do want to take a quick pause here to talk about how MacMost is supported.

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But the people that support MacMost also get extra videos and things I post at Patreon.

Check out MacMost.com/patreon, and you could read about what it's about, how it works, and all that if you're curious to find out more about that.

So the next thing I wanted to talk about here is the view options.

So we've seen so far how you can control this, mostly with the menu bar and mostly with things like clicking and interface elements.

But there's a whole other part to this.

If you go to view and show view options or command J, it brings up this little window here.

And this window gives you some of the same things you find in the menu there, like there's the group by and sort by for instance.

And if I switch views like to list view, this changes.

So icon view had things like, and we'll look at a second icon size and grid spacing, but that's not part of list view.

So when you switch to list view, you get things like which columns are shown.

So when you switch to column view, you get things that pertain to column view.

In gallery view, you get things that pertain to gallery view.

So if you have this little view show view window or show view options on, you can do more.

Let's look at icon view here.

You've got icon size.

If these icons are too small, you can make them bigger.

So you get more of a preview of what's there, or if they're too big, you can make them smaller.

So set it as you want.

You want the grid spacing to be bigger or smaller, you can.

In addition to that, you get control of the text size.

make the text size nice and big or, you know, smaller, normal size, however you want it and fit it with that.

You can in icon view have the labels to the right of the icons as well as below it.

You can have more info shown.

So this is like for the audio and video here, you've got times, right? For folders, how many items are in each folder for this image here, showing you the dimensions of the image.

So useful information here.

You can say, I don't want any previews.

I just want the default icons.

Icon view also has some cool stuff for the background.

So you can have the background color be something else.

So this is for this folder only.

If I go up a level and say into another folder and look at icon view, this one's white.

If I go back into this one, I've changed the background color and these other options for this folder only.

That could be useful because you may want to have different background colors for different things.

So it just helps you identify where you're located.

It gives you more of a relationship with which folder you're in and stuff.

You can also set it to a picture.

You could drag a picture here.

I'll just drag this one here.

Oh, that's not a picture, but this one is.

This will actually use a picture as a background.

So you could have a gradient using that.

It remembers the color.

It remembers the color, remembers the picture, and go back to default.

So cool, interesting stuff that you could do with the options in here.

List view has the ability to make a larger icon size.

It has the ability to do larger or smaller text size.

You could change the columns.

Maybe if this isn't doing this interface, sorry, this interface here isn't great for you.

You can always use it here.

You can change the dates here for relative dates.

It's gonna, it'll say like this, it'll say things like today, yesterday, last week, that kind of thing.

But notice here it has the time here for this, which was modified today.

But if I turn off relative dates, it actually gives me the date.

Calculate all sizes.

We'll calculate the folder sizes here, useful.

And you can have the previews shown off for the icons like that.

Column view has the same show icons here.

You can add just icons off completely if you don't like those.

There's also the preview column, which allows you to select a file here and you get the preview of it here on the right.

You actually have that for all views.

I'll show you here in a second.

You also have resize columns to fit findings, which is new in macOS Tahoe 26.2, I believe, or maybe it was 26.1.

So with this off, which is how it worked before, the columns wouldn't automatically resize to fit the file names of them.

So like this could be like too big or something like that.

And resize, automatically resize these to fit.

So it's kind of a nice little feature there.

You'd also change the text size here.

For gallery view, you've got the thumbnail size.

Let's go up a level here.

Actually, I'm gonna go up for gallery view.

Let's look at a folder that's filled with images and switch that to gallery view.

Now you can see here kind of the usefulness of this and you can use the arrow keys to go between all of these like that.

And you get a nice big view.

You could change the size of these icons here at the bottom with this, the thumbnails here.

You can also show a preview column of information to the right.

Whether or not you get the preview there and whether or not the file name is included there below.

So yeah, lots of different useful options there.

Another option that's not in here, that I know a lot of people really like, is having folders shown on top.

That's under Finder Settings.

And you want to go to Advanced, and you've got folders on top in Windows when sorting by name.

So let's turn that on.

And now you see the folders first, and then the files.

That's only when sorting by name.

So date modified, size, all that stuff is going to sort them differently.

But here when by name, the folders are first.

And that works also here, like here in icon view, if I say sort by name, the folders come first.

So a useful little function that you find in a different location and find your settings there.

And, you know, there's actually, when I talk about finder views, and at the beginning of this video I talked about there were four finder views, there's actually five, right? There's a fifth view that's very unique and interesting.

And that's the desktop.

The desktop could also have stuff on it.

If I go to my home folder here, actually I need to go to, since I'm using iCloud Drive, I will go to iCloud Drive, and I've got my desktop folder in iCloud Drive, and there's nothing in it right now.

Let's put a bunch of stuff in it.

I'm gonna take all this stuff from the demo folder and I just copied it and I'm gonna go back to the desktop and I'm gonna paste it in here.

That's gonna fill my desktop with stuff just for an example here.

So now notice that the desktop folder here and the desktop are showing the same files.

There is a separate location.

It's just two views of the same thing.

You've got your regular finder window view, which could be icons, could be list, could be column, could be gallery.

And then you've got this second view to view exactly the same stuff here.

I want to just turn this off.

Same stuff, but in a different way.

And they're not related.

Notice the icon view here, like, as I move things around, this is a different two-dimensional arrangement than say this, right? If I were to move these around.

So it's remembering two different icon views.

One is the finder window icon view for this particular folder.

This is the only folder that does this, the desktop.

And the other is the actual desktop view where it's always icon view and you just have the icons like that.

But you have view options.

Show view options when you have the desktop selected.

There's no other finder window here.

You've clicked here on the desktop to show that this is what's selected.

You've got desktop right here at the top so you know you're in the right place.

And you can control things like the icon size, the grid spacing, the text size for the desktop, the label position if you want.

Item info and whether or not icon previews are shown.

You can have it snap to grid or none.

So now you can arrange these like that.

You can have view and you can do cleanup, cleanup by, let's clean up by name, like that.

But you could also notice there, and this is something I didn't show before, cleanup selection.

So if I were to move a bunch of stuff over here and arrange it in a way like that, I could say, cleanup selection.

That works in icon view in a Finder window as well.

So yeah, you've got sort by options here.

You can always keep it sorted by name.

So it's going to stay sorted by name or one of the other sorting things, you can stay snap to grid.

So it's going to snap to a grid.

It won't let you just place them anywhere.

Turn that off and now you can place it anywhere.

You can clean up by.

And it has that grouping and a range as well.

But for the desktop view, it's called stack by.

and you could do stack by kind.

And now you get these stacks here, like all your documents are stacked together.

Stack by date added.

And now they're grouped together, like here's today and all that.

And I don't have very much variety and that may be date modified.

There we go.

Previous 30 days, 2025.

And it just kind of expands from the top right as the starting point when you do stack by.

So yeah, you've got these options.

It's very much like icon view in a different way with slightly different view options.

So something to keep in mind.

And one last thing that I wanna point out is that all of these views and all this stuff is available, not just in the Finder, but anytime you're in a Finder-like window, like for instance, here I am in Pages, I'm gonna open a document.

This is called an Open Dialogue.

There's also a Save Dialogue, where to save.

There's an Export Dialogue, where to export.

There's an import dialog when say you're in an app and you want to import an image.

There's a lot of different times when you end up with a window like this that allows you to select a file.

And when you have a window like this, you have very often these controls at the top to switch to icon view, to switch to column view like that.

You can use the keyboard shortcuts, command one, command two, command three for that gallery view is usually not available.

You get special features like for instance, an icon view here, There's a new document icon.

You only see that when you're opening a document in Pages.

In List View, you can sort like that.

You can use this button here to group or Option-click this button to sort.

And you can do this in different ways.

Let's do Icon View.

I can group items by kind in Icon View here.

And it will remember it.

So the next time I open up a document in Pages, it's going to have these options here.

Now I can option click and sort by here as well.

So you've got lots of different options.

All these different finder options are available in the open save import and export dialogues as well.

So that's something to keep in mind.

And I think that's a pretty comprehensive look at some of the things that you can do with all these different views and how you can explore them with the finder windows.

Some people like to say, hey, I like ListView, ListView is for me.

I'm only gonna use ListView.

Other people may do the same with Column or IconView.

Other people just use them interchangeably.

I mostly use ListView, occasionally switching into ColumnView.

ListView has some neat features that you can't do elsewhere.

For instance, I can open up multiple folders, and you could say I even have a sum folder opened up here.

I can select files at different locations.

I selected two files here at the level of the demo folder, a file here inside the more things folder, and two files inside stuff, inside even more stuff like that.

So now if I wanted to drag and drop these, share them, attach them to something, open them, I can do that.

I can't really do that in icon view or column view.

So that's really useful.

Also, like the expanding stuff, another tip I've got is if you select all, so you have all these folders selected, you see the keyboard shortcut, command right arrow will open up one of these folders.

Let's do one that's got stuff in it.

Right arrow opens up one of these folders.

Left, command right arrow, command left arrow.

To be clear, if I were to select multiple folders, command right arrow opens them all up.

Command left arrow closes them.

Command A selects everything.

And since command right arrow doesn't do anything to files, only folders, I can do command A, command right arrow, and it opens up all the folders.

Command A, command left arrow closes all the folders.

A lot of cool things you can do in ListView.

I find you could go further with ListView than a lot of other views.

So yeah, that pretty much wraps up what I wanna talk about.

I just want to quickly see if there are any questions here in the chat.

Somebody could explain the cleanup feature.

I think I did.

It's the cleanup in here to be able to do a one-time, in case you missed it.

a one-time cleanup will clean everything up, snap it to the grid, or clean up by a one-time cleanup of your icon view that doesn't then restrict you to continuing to have everything cleaned up, unlike sort by, which will clean things up, but now it's like permanent until you switch back to sort by none.

So yeah, it's a really, it's a good feature when you wanna clean things up, but you don't wanna just keep them sorted.

You wanna be able to clean it up and say, but I wanna put invoice.txt over here by itself now that I've cleaned up the rest of it.

And also you could select stuff, you could say, so let's say this is a mess, like that.

I could say, you know what, take this stuff here.

And then if I clean up, let's see, clean up like that, nope, it'll clean everything up.

So yeah, you could do that on the desktop like this, and you could say clean up selection.

But inside of a window, you get to clean up everything or clean up everything by, you don't get to just clean up the selection like that.

It doesn't.

It'll do it for everything.

So yeah, I hope that answers that question.

Somebody asked me, "Can we change the color of a folder on the desktop?" Sure you can.

You and Mac OS, Tahoe, just select a folder, control-click, right-click, or two-finger-click, and say "Customize Folder," or use one of these little color chips here to assign a tag to it, change its color.

You can also do customize folder and then you can remove the tag and apply whichever tag you want to it like that.

So you can do that and you can of course use that to apply an icon to it as well.

And yeah, somebody says seems like we have to play around and find which one we want to stick with.

Yep, and don't be afraid to challenge that assumption later on.

I'm a good example of that because I could say for years, if you go back and MacMost videos far enough, you hear me talking about column view, like that's the only one to use.

I talk about, you know, 15 years ago, that I use column view, column view superior.

And now, list view for me is the one I use all the time, but I've learned my lesson to not say that one is like the best or not.

I just use list view most of the time.

But if I had stuck with column view and just never tried anything else, never ever once in a while went to list view that I wanted some of the features there, I would have never changed my mind about it.

I'm trying to keep an open mind about it even now.

Maybe Column View will be something I switch back to.

Maybe it's because when I developed games most of the time, the type of projects I was working on and how things were, Column View was better for me.

Now that I develop these video tutorials most of the time, List View works better for me.

Maybe it's a task-oriented thing.

Oh, and also, yeah, somebody pointed out that you do have a universal setting for folders on the desktop.

So if you want to change one, I just showed you how to do that.

But now under Appearance, you could change the folder color right here for all folders to the default folder color, like that.

So if that's what you're going for, because you say you want these folders to fit in better with your desktop background, you've got this setting here in System Settings, and you can go to automatic, or you could actually choose any color, which is really interesting.

I mean, well, not quite any color, but you have a lot of variety here of the color that you want for it, and set it to automatic to go back to just using the regular folder color that we're all used to.

Okay, I think that about wraps it up for this live video about finder views.

I've got other videos I've done that have asked about finder views, specific things, but I think it was fun to do a live exploration of them and hopefully I threw off enough tips here and there to make it valuable for everyone.

So thanks for watching!