How To Use Mac Desktop Stacks

Desktop Stacks can help you clean up your messy Desktop while still keeping the files you want available there.

Video Transcript: Hi, this is Gary with MacMost.com. Let's take a look at using Desktop Stacks on your Mac. 
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Desktop Stacks is a feature that has been around for a few years. It solves a particular problem that a lot of Mac users have. The problem is this: having a Desktop that is littered with all sorts of different icons. Not only is this a lot of clutter but it can reduce productivity not being able to find things very easily. I find the best way to solve this problem myself is to simply not store any files at all in the Desktop folder. But if you like having files on the Desktop or find that you can't stop putting things there then Desktop Stacks may be the solution for you to clean it up a bit. 
So to turn on Desktop Stacks you can do it one of three ways. The first way is to go to View and you should see Use Stacks right here in the View Menu. But you have to have the Desktop selected. So, for instance if you have another Finder window open, the Finder window here is selected. If you go to View you'll find Use Groups instead and this applies to this window, not the Desktop. You can select the Desktop by clicking on it and you can see how this window isn't active anymore. If you go to View you can see Use Stacks there or simply close the window so the only thing visible for the Finder is the Desktop. Then you can go to View and then see Use Stacks. If you don't see Use Stacks here it means the Finder is not the front-most app or you've got a Finder window chosen, not the Desktop. So you can use this to turn it On. 
The second way, of course, is to use the keyboard shortcut you can see right here, Control Command and then 0 or you can use the Context Menu. You bring that up with either Control Click, right click or two-finger click on a trackpad on the Desktop and then you see Use Stacks. So with anyone of these methods if you turn it On you're going to see this mess transformed into this. These are Stacks. Notice that each one represents a different kind of file. So I've got Documents, Images, Movies, PDF documents, and so on. 
These aren't actually folders. No folders have actually been created. It is just grouping things together on the screen. So each file is still just there in the Desktop folder, it is just now grouped visually. So if I want to see the individual files I can do it by clicking on the group. So if I want to see the images I click on the group here and then all the images expand and they into that column, if needed. If I want to close it I click again. So I can expand all the documents here. I can expand all the movie files like that. 
There's also another way to view what's in it. While things are open if you want to do anything with these files you certainly can. You can double click on one, for instance, to open it and it will open up in the default app or you can Drag and Drop it somewhere or do whatever you want. But you can't rearrange how they are here on the Desktop since the Desktop is now using Stacks so everything is set in place with the Stacks. 
There is another way to actually view the items inside of a Stack. That is to put your pointer over it, like I'm over the Documents Stack right now. Then using two-fingers on the trackpad or mouse you can move left and right, like that, over it and it will scroll through the items. So you can use that to find something that you want and stop on it. At this point if you were to actually double-click on the item it actually would open it up and you can see the stack remains closed. So you don't need to open a stack to view what's in there. You can scroll back and forth with two fingers on a Magic Trackpad or Magic Mouse. 
Now when you add new things to the Desktop they automatically go into these Stacks. So they are always going to be active if you have Stacks turned on. So, for instance, if I were to take this photo here, and let's Copy it with Command C, and then I'm going to Paste  it on the Desktop you can see it pastes it inside this Stack here. But do note that this doesn't change your Desktop folder when you view it as a Finder window. So if I create a new Finder window here and I go to the Desktop folder I'm going to see all the files, the same ones that are in these Stacks but my Desktop folder still views in whichever view I'm using here. So I'm going List. If I do Icon View everything is going to be setup here in the Finder window.
The Finder window shows your Desktop contents independently of how they look on the actual Desktop. So there is no Stacks here in this. You can do View and use Groups to group things together so you get basically the same functionality in Stacks. But whether you're using Groups in the Finder window doesn't effect the Stacks that are on the Desktop. 
Now by default Stacks are going to group by kind of file here, Documents, Movies, and so on. But you can go to View and then Group Stacks By and change that. So if you choose None it's the same as turning Use Stacks off. But I can switch to another kind of grouping. Like, for instance, let's do Date Created. Now you could see everything is sorted here by years. The kinds of groups you get depends on the range of dates that you've got. So if I go and instead group by, say, Date Last Opened I'm going to get Today, Previous 30 Days, and Years and earlier for even before those years. If I do it by Tag you can see I've got a couple files here that have tags and the rest are grouped with no tags. You've got some other settings here as well, Date Added and Date Modified. You can also group by Shared By. So if you have a lot of Shared files on your Desktop you can see all the ones that are Shared and all the ones that are not shared in different stacks. 
So let's switch back to Kind here. I'm going to show you even more options. You get more options when you go to View and then Show View Options or Command J. This brings up the little window here with View Options that changes depending upon what you have selected. So you're going to see different things in Finder View Options if you have a Finder window opened for instance. Maybe it's in List View or Icon View. But if you've got the Desktop selected here this is what it looks like and you've got Stacked By and by selecting None is having Stacks turned Off and Stacked By is having one of those options we looked at before. But you also, here, can select Sort By. So, for instance, if I looked at PDF documents here I can change it. So I can Sort By Date Modified instead of Date Added. So it is the sorting inside of each stack. So you can Sort them by name, for instance. 
You can also change the Icon size as you can normally on the Desktop and this will effect the Stacks. It is useful to have it larger if you plan on scrolling through them using two-fingers. You can also change Grid spacing, the Text Size for the text under each one and you can even have the label position go to the right instead of underneath. A particularly useful one that I like to have turned on if I'm using this is Show Item Info. This will put the number of items in each stack which is really useful. You can also change from showing an Icon Preview, whatever on top of the stack being the icon there and then kind of a jumble of other icons underneath it. You could change that to using the default icon for that document type, so we have Pages for Pages documents and Numbers for spreadsheets, the jpeg image icon here for images, and so on. This is great for people who don't like to constantly see the icons changing on their Desktop when they add new files or sort things. This will just keep everything using the same icon all the time.
Here are a couple of extra things to know about Stacks. One is that if you have aliases that those will group just like they're the real files. So, for instance, I'm going to go to the Application's folder. I know some people like to keep aliases to applications on the Desktop. When you drag from the Applications folder to the Desktop it automatically creates an alias. It doesn't try to actually move the file there. So let's move a couple of apps there. I'm going to move the Calculator App here and you could see here since it is just one item it just puts it there by itself. But if I put another item there, like the Calendar app, you could see now it creates a Stack called Applications and I get the aliases there. So aliases are grouped together in Stacks just like regular files. 
But how about folders? Well, if we're on the Desktop here and I create a new folder, the folder gets created there and it sits there by itself and even if you add new folders, the folders don't stack. So any folders you have on your Desktop will appear as just regular folders. You're not going to get a folder's Stack. 
Now it is okay to use Stacks sometimes and not others. It's easy to turn it On and Off. You just use the keyboard shortcut or just select in the Menu there. Sometimes you might want to have Stacks Off, sometimes you may want to have them On. Maybe you really do like working with a clutter of icons on the Desktop but you like to clean things up, maybe when you're having a meeting or about to make a presentation, but not completely get rid of the items off of the Desktop.
So you can always use Desktop Stacks, never use Desktop Stacks, or you can use it sometime if you prefer. I hope you found this useful. Thanks for watching.

Comments: 4 Responses to “How To Use Mac Desktop Stacks”

Sheldon

2 months ago

Thanks bunches

Rob

This was great - it was a feature that I didn't use because I didn't understand it. Pretty simple, but as with most of your video's it is explained well.

Jared Rifkin

1- Discovered "stacks" last year and love this de-clutterer.
2- Single, not double, cliak to open or close stack. (You said double early in your always excellent presenrarion.)
3- A new file always goes to top/1st in stack.
4- Is there any way ro create a new custom labelled stack?
5- Is there any way to have new desktop folder go into a stack?

Gary Rosenzweig

Jared: There are no custom Stacks, sorry. Folders aren't part of it either.

How To Use Mac Desktop Stacks

Comments: 4 Responses to “How To Use Mac Desktop Stacks”

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