How To Turn On the Finder’s Hidden Media Info Columns

Hi, this is Gary with MacMost.com. Let me show you how you can reveal hidden media information columns, like Duration and Dimensions, in the Mac Finder. 

So if you take a look at this Finder window you'll notice something a little different about it. It's in List View and there are some columns here on the right, Duration and Dimension and Title, that you normally don't see in List View. These are hidden columns in the Finder that you can reveal using the a special technique. 

First let's take a look at how you customize columns in the Finder. First you want to be in List View. Information columns, like Date Modified, Size, and Kind, only appear in List View. You don't see them in Icon View or Column View. Now you can customize these by using View and then Show Options or Command J. There is a list of columns here and you can use the checkboxes to hide or show them. For instance I can turn off the Size Column, like that, and then turn it back on again. But there is a quicker way to do it. If you put the pointer somewhere here in the column headings and instead of clicking you Control Click, you'll get this little pop-up menu that shows you all the columns that are available and you can check or uncheck anyone of them. So I can add, for instance, Date Created like that and I can Control Click, right click, or two-finger click again and remove Date Created, like that. 

Now when you go into a folder that actually has files in it, like let's go into this Photos Folder here, there are a whole bunch of different images. It's useful to see this information like Day Modified, Size, and Kind. You may want to reveal some other columns as well. But you won't see here are things specific to the fact that these are images. Things like dimensions. It would be useful to see the width and height of these images here in the Finder. You can do it for an individual file by selecting it and using Command i for get info and you'll see, under more info here, the dimensions and lots of other information. You can also use View and then Show Preview and then you'll get this preview here on the right that will also include information like dimension and resolution here. But you won't see it for all of these items at once in a nice list like you will here for like, say, with the size of each file. You won't be able to sort them using that information either.

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Now something interesting happens if you go to your Home Folder, use Go, Home, you should see some standard folders in here as well as some others that you created on your own. These standard folders should always include Movies, Music, and Pictures. These are special folders with special purposes. For instance the Pictures folder contains your Photos Library and Photos App. The Music folder usually contains your Library and media from the Music App, and the Movies Folder has apps like iMovie. You can also use them for your own purposes. For instance in the Picture Folder here I do have the Photos Library, which is there by default, and also other apps. But I also have a few other images and folders with images that I put there myself. But the Picture Folder itself is not my own custom folder. That came with the Home Folder that was part of the Home Folder when I created the account. It's a special folder. It has a special ability. If I Control Click, right click, or two-finger click in the column headings here to reveal the column options I'll notice that I get two more options here that weren't available in the other folders, the ones I created. They are Dimension and Resolution. If I turn one of these on, like Dimensions here, I'll see that some of my image files actually show the dimensions here. So I know this one, for instance, is 3840 by 2160 and this one is 400 by 400. This one doesn't seem to include the information as part of metadata in that file. 

Now the reason that these two columns are available here is because this is a special folder for handling pictures. But getting these two columns as options does't rely on it being this picture's folder. It will work with any folder named Pictures. If I go back up here to the Home folder and I'll say go into Movies I'll see that for folders named Movies, not just this one but any folder named Movies, I have Duration, Dimensions, Title, and Codex. Then if I look in the Music folder I'll see I have a whole bunch of different columns I can add simply because this folder is called Music. So that's the key thing here. These are not special columns just for these three special folders. You can get these for any folders with that name. 

So let's go back here to this custom Photos folder that I created. If i go into it and I Control click here I don't get those extra columns. But if I change the name to Pictures and then I go in, and then I look I do get those extra columns. So just renaming the folder does it. Let me add Dimensions here. Now I'm going to get the dimensions for each of these photos. Now not only can I easily see all the photos by dimensions I can sort. It is going to sort, of course, using width. It can't sort both width and height. But I'll get the smallest width first. If I click again it will sort the other direction. So I can view the dimensions for all these photos at once and sort by them, at least by the width. If I add Resolution it is going to put that here as well. You can see there is one photo here that doesn't actually have a resolution set in metadata and the others do. I can sort by this column as well. I can click here on Name to sort by Name again.

Now you may think this is great except that you have to name the folder Pictures in order to get this. That's true except that you can change the name back and you keep these columns. So here I am with Pictures and I'm going to go back up a level and now I'm going to change this back to its original name, the one I really. want. If I go into it you'll notice that I keep these two columns here. I only needed to change the folder temporarily to get the columns. Not only that but it keeps them for good as in I can turn them both off, like that, and now if I go back into this folder later on even though I've not changed the name back to Pictures, I can still add those columns back in. It remembers that those should be options for this folder. 

Now let's look at this folder, Audio Files, here and you see that I only get the standard set of columns. But if I were to change the name to Music, go in and add the columns I want like say Duration here and maybe let's add Title here as well, then it is going to take this information from the metadata in these files, if it is available, and put it here. Then I can change this back or to anything I want and it will retain those columns I've added. I'll only see the columns I've added. I won't have the option to add others unless I change the name back to Music again. So now with a collection of Audio Files I can sort by duration which certainly can come in handy. I can see the title that's inside the metadata which could be really handy if this file, say, was named, you know, Song 1. You can actually see what the real name of the song in it was at least when that was put in the metadata at the time that audio file was created. 

Now here's a folder called Videos. If I go into that you can see I only get the standard things. But if I change this to Movies and go in I can now add Dimensions, Duration, Title, and Codex. So let's go and add Duration for this and Codex as well here to have that information and then I'll change the name back. 

Now here's something interesting about this. It works for subfolders too. So I've got this folders called More Photos and in it are three subfolders each with photos in them. Of course it''s named More Photos so I can't add those special columns. But if I were change this to Pictures, like that, go in here and then you can see at this level I can add Dimensions and Resolution. But I don't want that for here because it doesn't do me any good just looking at folders. But if I go into a folder, because there's a picture's folder in the path here, it is just one up from it, I now have the ability to add Dimensions even though this folder isn't called Pictures. The one above it is. Then if I change this back you'll see that it retains, in this one folder where I added it, that Dimensions column. 

Another thing you can do is you can mix them. So I've got this folder here that has a bunch of different types of files in it. Let's go and change its name to Pictures. Now I'm going to go into it and add the Dimensions column. Note that I not only get dimensions for images but also for videos as well. But in addition I can go in and change this to Music and then go back in and I get all of the different Music options here. So I can add Title, for instance. Notice that this image here actually has some metadata that gives it a Title. So I get that for the image even though that wasn't an option for images. I can go back up and change this to Movies and with Movies here I can add Codex. So you see now I've got Dimensions from when I changed the name to Pictures. I got Title when I changed the name to Music and I got Codex when I changed the name to Movies. Now I can simply change this back to the name I want but I keep these columns and they all still appear her in the menu.

Also if you want to reuse a configuration it will remember it even if you duplicate the folder. So I've got Dimensions, Duration, and Title here in this examples folder. I'm going to select it and then duplicate the Examples folder. Go in here and you see I've got these. I'm going to clear this out so it's empty and rename it, you know, Media Folder Template. I guess store that somewhere else and anytime I want to have a a Media Folder with those columns I can take this empty Media Folder Template and I can duplicate it, like that, Name it something and then notice I've got those columns in there. Now I can files to this and those columns will already be there. 

Another tip is that it works with the way you can view subfolders in List View. For instance, here in More Photos I changed the name to Pictures, added the Dimensions Column and then changed the name back to More Photos. But I didn't do anything to these subfolders here. So if I go say to Photos too I don't get that extra column. But I can always just reveal the content of each of these and I'll get the columns from the main folder in the subfolders when I simply do it this way. 

One last note is that sometimes the information in these columns doesn't populate when you first add the menu. Sometimes it's the next time you visit the folder where you'll  actually see there. Other times when you actually move a file there, like I'll paste three files, you can see  I pasted in these three images here and it's not giving me any dimensions. But if I go up a level and then back down into the folder you can see now the ones that actually did have dimension information now show them. 

Now this feature in the Finder can be very useful if you use lots of media with your work. Note that it seems like I have but this has been around for many many years so I don't think it is the kind of thing we're ever going to see go away. I just hope that at some point Apple allows some way to add these without having to do the trick of changing the folder name temporarily and maybe even allows us to add more columns as well. Hope you found this useful. Thanks for watching.