How To Use The Finder Info Window

The Finder Info window and Inspector is a basic multitool for viewing and changing information about a file. You can use it in a variety of ways to manage your files.

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Video Transcript: Hi, this is Gary with MacMost.com. Today let's take a closer look at the Finder Info Window.
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So most Mac users at one time or another have used the Finder's Info Window. You can bring it up by selecting a file in the Finder and then going to File, Get Info or Command i. This brings up the Info Window. The Info Window has information at the top and it's broken up into several sections. You can expand or hide the sections by clicking on the little Reveal button to the left of each section title. So you can collapse everything so that you just see the titles there or you could expand everything to see all the information. At the top of the window you'll see the File Name, you'll see the size and the time modified. Then under that you'll see an area for Tags. If you use Finder Tags you can see them here. You can click in here and select a tag to add or just simply type it and add the tag that way. So if you use tags it's easy to add them, edit them, remove them through the Info Window. Then you can expand a section here , like General, and see more information. So, for instance, here under General we see the Kind, in this case a Pages document, we see the Size by bytes, we also see the location of the file. Now here's a tip. You see how the location of the file is kind of spelled out here in a special format. If you were to select that and Copy and then go to another app, I'm just going to open up TextEdit, and then Paste it in you could see I get the actual real path, not the summary you kind of see here. That can be useful if you're looking of a path of a file to use in ScriptEditor, Automator, or somewhere else. You also see more Time information. Like the time created as well as the time modified. 
For most files you'll see to tech boxes here. Stationery Pad and Locked. Locking a file will make it harder to Delete or Edit that file. So if there's a file you want to protect from accidentally modifying it or deleting it then you could simply lock it here. No need to mess around with permissions or the terminal or anything else. Stationery Pad is similar to that in that if you double click to open a file marked as a Stationery Pad it will open up a copy of that file instead of the original. Before we go any further I want to show you the best tip about the Info Window. There are actually two versions of it. One is the Info Window that we have brought up here. Now the thing with the Info Window is when you select another file the Info Window still shows you information about the file you originally asked for. So even though I've selected another file here and I continue to move around, this Info Window will still show the original info from the original file that I selected and chose Get Info to see. 
But, if instead I go to File, Get Info and hold the Option key down it changes to Show Inspector. Option Command i. If I use that I get something that looks just like the Info Window, and it pretty much is. The title area here is smaller and this window will stay on top no matter what I select. In addition to that it will change to reference the file that is selected. So here's the original file but if I choose this file you can see the Inspector changes now to show me info for that file. So in a way the Inspector is much more valuable than the basic Info Window. One of the main differences is that the Inspector allows you to select multiple files. So I could choose, say, these three images here by holding the Command key down. If I were to use Command i you could see it brings up three Info Windows. One for each one of these files. But if I were to use Option Command i it brings up one Inspector here that says Three Items and gives me the total file size used and even a range of days for modified. So it's really useful for inspecting multiple files.You could even make changes. For instance, if I click Locked all three of those files are now locked. Now using the Inspector allows us to jump around to different files to see how the information displayed is different depending upon the file type. So, for instance, for a Pages file under More Info I don't get too much. I just basically see where the file was created and when it was last opened. But if I switch to this image file here you could see More Info gives me a ton of more information. Some of the metadata for this file. For instance the exposure time, the focal length, the device that was used to take the photo, the dimensions. If I switch to this video here you could see I get the codec used to compress the file and the duration. 
Now continuing down the list here, if I look at Name & Extension I could see the name of the file. Now the difference between the name up here and the name down here is I can actually use this to Rename the file. So another way to rename the file is using the Info Window or the Inspector. Now you also have the ability to set the Hide Extension flag for the file. Now here under Finder, Preferences under Advanced I have Show All File Name Extensions. Let's turn that Off and you can see for some files there's no extension and for some files there is. So with this file selected if I turn On Hide Extension the extension is hidden for that file. It only effects that one file not everything. But using Finder, Preferences, Show All Extensions overrides that. 
Next we've got Comments. So you can add anything you want in here. You could describe the file, add some notes, things like that. The useful thing about Comments is  they show up in Searches. So let's type something that wouldn't normally be found. It's not a normal word. I'll just type that there. So I've added that in the Comments. Now if I do a Spotlight Search, Command Space, and I look for it you'll see that document comes up. So it's really useful to be able to add descriptors here to help you find files. It's particularly useful if you have a file, say an image or a video, that doesn't have any text data with it. You can add things in comments to describe it and make it easier for you to find it later on. Now under Open With you have the ability to change which app opens this particular file. Let's select this image here and you can see the default is Preview. But I could change it to open say in Infinity Photo. Now when I double click on this file it will open up in Infinity Photo. I could also click Change All and it will change all files of this type to open with this particular app. If the app you want isn't in this list you could choose Other and then select from the Applications folder any app you've got.
Under Preview there's another way to preview a file that's similar to QuickLook or the Preview area in the Finder. So for an image you'll see a larger preview of the image. For a Pages document you'll see that document and you'll even get arrows here. You'd think you'd be able to page through it but you can't. In fact you can as long as you're using the Info Window. You could see with the Info Window it works. But the Inspector, for some reason, it doesn't. The same is true if you're looking at a pdf or even a video.  You can view the video in the Info Window but it doesn't work if you bring up the Inspector.
Now the last section here is one most people don't need to get to. It's Sharing & Permissions. These are the permissions for your User Account though in this case Read & Write is usually what's there. For other admin accounts on this Mac that's Staff and for Everybody. Now just because it says Read Only doesn't mean all the other users that have accounts on this Mac can read it because it's parent folder or the parent folder of that or somewhere along the chain has it set where you can't actually view those files. So just because they have Read Only permissions doesn't mean they can actually get to the file because they probably can't see any files at your account.
Now you can also select a Folder and get folder information like the total size of all the files in that folder. Other things in here like General information are, as you would expect, just has Kind - Folder. But instead of having Stationery Pad here it has Shared Folder and you could make this a shared folder which means that in System Preferences, Sharing, then under File Sharing you'll see that folder appear here and you can assign permissions for other user accounts on your Mac to be able to View or Change those files. Now in addition to a Folder here you could also click on the Background for the Finder Window and it will actually give you information for the current folder, in this case the Documents folder. So here I see the total size and under General I can see even more specific size and the number of items that are contained here. 
So that's a look at using the Info Window and the Inspector in the Finder. It's a tool that not every Mac user needs to use but it's useful to know that it's there and what its capabilities are.

Comments: 3 Responses to “How To Use The Finder Info Window”

Tom Gonser, Sr

4 years ago

As often the case, this is another deep dive into a very focused topic that most Mac users would otherwise not fully understand/appreciate. Thanks!

Andrea Grasselli

Thank you Gary!
What is the difference between using tags and comments?

Gary Rosenzweig

Andrea: Tags/Keywords are single words (or word-like things) you use over and over to "tag" photos that have something in common. A comment is any text you want, usually a description of what the file contains.

Comments Closed.

How To Use The Finder Info Window

Comments: 3 Responses to “How To Use The Finder Info Window”

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