How To Maintain Your Downloads Folder On a Mac

Hi, this is Gary with MacMost.com. Let me show you how to maintain your Downloads Folder on your Mac. 

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So your Downloads Folder is where files go when you download them, typically in your web browser but from other apps as well. You'll see your Downloads folder in two places. One is on the Dock. You could see the Downloads folder here to the right. But the other would be in your Home folder. In your Home folder you'll find folders like Movies, Music, Pictures, and sometimes Desktop and Documents if you're not using iCloud Drive. But you also find the Downloads folder there. You can go into it. The Downloads folder is really just a normal folder that happens to be in the Home folder for your user account. So how do things end up in your Downloads folder? 

Well, typically when you download something in Safari or another web browser by default they go into the Downloads folder. So here I am at the MacMost page with a PDF that you could download. I'll click on the download link and you can actually see the animation of the file going into the Downloads folder in the Dock. Here I am at a page with an image and there's a Download button here as well. I'll download this. You could see that you have to get permission to allow downloads from a website. Once I do you can see it go into the same location. Here's another site with a download image. But this time it will just open up another webpage. If I want to download it I could Control Click on it, right click or two-finger click on a trackpad, and you could see I get the option to save the image to Downloads. Here's another location with some PDF's on it. In this case if I were to click on it it would just show me in the web browser, but I can Control Click on it and then Save the download linked file and that would, by default, go into the Downloads folder. Likewise, say I'm in Mail and I want to save an attachment. I would go to this button here and you could see I could Save All or Select this Image and it would, by default, go to the Downloads folder. 

Other apps do this as well. Browsers by default should save things to the Downloads folder and apps that download files for various different reasons should default to the Downloads folder.

So now here's what we've got in the Downloads folder. You could see all those files I downloaded are here. Now that they are here they are really no different from any other file. For instance I could select an image here, use the Spacebar for QuickLook to view it, or I could double click it to open it up in the default app, in this case Preview. That might be all I need to do. But sometimes you may download something you need to install. So you would run an installer here in the Downloads folder. Other times it may be files that you want to save permanently. Leaving them in the Downloads folder is probably not the best idea then. So you want to come up with a strategy for how you deal with downloads in the Downloads folder. Otherwise they'll just accumulate here and could take up lots of drive space. So ideally you would want to move them to a place in your Documents folder. Something that makes sense. So, for instance, I can move photos there. Maybe other files to the different subfolders that makes sense so I know where they are. In some cases, after viewing a file, I may decide I don't need it anymore. I could just move it to the Trash. 

It's best to do those things as soon as you can. Don't leave them sitting around the Downloads folder. A way to avoid this is to instead of using the default Downloads location use the Download Linked File As and then you can save it to where you want directly from the browser. It doesn't have to go to the Downloads folder. Just about anywhere you can download a file you can Control Click, right click, or two-finger click on a trackpad, and use Download Linked File As. Often you can even drag and drop images and other files from the web browser directly into a folder. 

Now another place you may think of as the Downloads folder is this button here in Safari. If you click that it's Show Downloads and it will give you history of files that you've downloaded recently. You can click the little magnifying glass here and it will actually open up the location of that file. So if it's in the Downloads folder it will go there or if you saved it to another location it would go to that location. This is just a little history list. It's not really the location of the downloads. But you can actually double click on it and it will open it right from here. So I can see how some people may mistake this as the actual location instead of just a history list of what you've done. You can use the Clear button to clear this list. But you could also go in Safari Preferences to General and then you have a setting here for Remove Download List Items and then they automatically get removed after a day, whenever you quit Safari, right after the download is finished, or leave it Manually so you have to use that Clear button. It's really up to you. It doesn't hurt to have that list around. Also notice there's a setting here, Change the Default Download Location. So you can use the Downloads Folder which is what makes sense, but you can set another location. That could be useful if say you want to download a series of images. You want to do it quickly. You could temporarily set the other location to the exact file where you want those downloads. Then when you're done set it back to the default Downloads Folder. 

But you could also set it to Ask For Each Download. So now when I go to download a file it's going to prompt me every time for a location. That's a great way to keep the Downloads Folder empty and make sure everything gets to the proper spot.

Now what about here in the Dock. You've got, by default, this Downloads Folder here. It's just a regular folder that's been added to the right side of the Dock. You can actually remove it like that. Or if you've already removed it you could simply go to it again, I'll go to my Home folder there and there's Downloads, and you could add it back in. Now you may want to change some settings for the Downloads folder in the Dock. I'll Control Click to bring up the Context Menu. You really want to use Fan or Grid. If you use List it appears like this but you can't actually drag and drop from a list. You can however drag and drop from a Fan or Grid. So I can take this file here and drag it to the Desktop or to any Finder folder. You can also go in and change the Sort By option. With Downloads you probably want to have it as Date Added so you can easily find most recent downloads. If you use Date Modified or Date Created it's going to take the date of the original file. So it may not be when you downloaded it but when the file was created. So they'll be in an order that doesn't seem to make sense to you. Also if you don't like icon at the bottom here changing depending upon what's in the folder you can set Display As to Folder and it will always look like this Downloads Folder icon. You can also easily get to the Downloads Folder by clicking here and selecting Open in Finder.

Now what happens if you have let your Downloads Folder get away from you. It's filled with files. Well, then you're going to want to go through it and figure out what you need and what you don't need. What you don't need put in the Trash. What you do need save elsewhere. It's very easy to leave things in the Downloads Folder. Everybody does it. I do it. For instance when you install new apps sometimes the app will actually prompt you to take the installer and remove it from the Downloads folder and put it in the trash. But other times it leaves it in the Downloads folder. You just downloaded a new app. You're next action is going to be to open it up and play around with the app. Not to take the time to go to the Downloads folder to delete the installer. The same is sometimes true of images, PDF's and other things you get. Sometimes you use them in the Downloads folder but you're not sure at the moment whether or not you want to Save it. For instance if you're a graphic artist you may be downloading dozens of different stock images, fonts, and other things and trying them out. You're only going to save the ones that you're going to use. Other times you're taking things like images, imported them into graphics apps or video apps and using them there. You don't necessarily need to save the file anywhere else. So you kind of forget that it's in the Downloads folder until one day you look and find your downloads folder is packed with files. 

So try to keep ahead of it. Save files directly to folders when you can. Remember to remove files from Downloads folder after they go there as soon as you can. Then make it a regular task to look in your Downloads folder and clean out files that got left there for some reason and you don't need them anymore.