Live: Customizing and Using Your Finder Sidebar

Hi everyone, this is Gary with MacMost.com.

Here's a special live episode where I'm going to tell you how to customize and use the Finder Sidebar.

So, the Finder Sidebar is a really important tool for using your Mac.

You have it available in all the Finder windows, so it's always kind of there.

and when you're doing all sorts of different functions with the files like moving them around organizing them and such it's just right there and it's really useful if you make use of it a lot of people just don't use it at all and you can customize it to get it to do the things that you want so let's take a look here here i've got the sidebar right here on the left so it's everything from recents down to tags right here.

If you don't see it, you need to go to view and there's hide and show sidebar like this.

So you can hide it and then you can show it.

So I never have it hidden.

It's always shown, but you can certainly have it hidden sometimes and then that's how you get to it.

You can also click and drag right here to make it larger and smaller.

There's no point making it much larger than the largest item that you've got there but you also don't want to make it too small where it kind of concatenates all of or kind of shortens all the names like that so you know you want to make it a good length for what you've got if you double click it it actually goes to the right length so like double click and you can see it snaps to kind of the smallest size it needs to be while still fitting everything.

So let's take a look at customizing it.

You see several different sections in here.

At the top, you see two items kind of floating on their own.

And then you see the first section called favorites, although it may be different for you.

And I'll show you during this tutorial, like how to rearrange these.

So you'll see favorites, you see locations, and you'll see tags.

Older versions of macOS had another section here specifically for iCloud, but macOS Tahoe, that's not there anymore and we'll get more into that.

So looking at all these different sections and all the items in here, how you customize it starts with Finder Settings.

So we're going to Finder Settings here and then we want to go to Sidebar.

And this has a bunch of checkboxes where you can turn on or off various things here.

Now, this isn't everything that you can do as I'm going to show you.

but it's the place to start because it has a lot of the most common things here and things that you can't add or remove any other way well actually i think you can remove things by dragging out i'll show you that but you can't add some of these things any other way for instance here at the top recents and shared these things are kind of on their own not in a section and you can turn them on and off by adding or removing them using the check boxes here and i'll take a look at what each one of those are.

And then you have similar checkboxes for other things.

Under favorites, you've got various things, your desktop documents folder, your downloads folder, then movies, music, and pictures, which are important folders in your home folder, also your applications folder.

And then we'll take a look at the things here under locations and tags in a few minutes.

So let's take a look at recents first.

Recents is a really very misunderstood thing.

A lot of people think this is a location.

Notice that it is not showing a folder here.

It's showing a little clock.

If you click on it, it's going to give you what are the results of a search.

There isn't a place called recents.

This is just giving you a list of all your most recent files that are located in different places.

So if I select this file here, I can go to view and I could show the path bar at the bottom, I could see this is an iCloud Drive documents and a folder called current stuff.

This one is iCloud Drive documents PDFs.

So it's showing you basically a search for show me my latest things.

And in fact, the criteria it's using is date last opened.

And you could see it here.

So recents is going to give you list view, although you could switch it afterwards.

And it's going to use date last opened and show you a list of your last open files, not your last created files, not your last modified files, not your last added files, but last opened files.

So it's a search result.

You don't put something into recents.

You don't take something out of recents.

You don't delete something from recents.

Recents is a search.

It's kind of a statement of fact.

These are your most recently opened files.

So it's important to realize that and not treat it as a location.

Like if you see something here and say, I don't want that in my recents.

If you delete it, you're deleting the file.

The file was gone.

It's not somewhere else now.

It's not on your drive anymore.

This is just giving you a list.

If you don't want to see recents, and I personally don't really use it.

So I usually, on my main account, I get rid of it, not have it there.

I'm going to look later in this video.

At the end, the last thing I show is going to be how to maybe build something that's better than recents because recents may not give you what you want.

In particular, date last open means that files that you've never opened are going to be there.

So if you download a file, you would expect it to be the most recent file, but you've never opened the file.

Thus, it is not shown in this list, which is really confusing for a lot of users.

But I'll show you how to make your own version of recents.

Shared is a new item here, or at least it's new being here at the top, where it's going to show you all the files and folders that either you've shared with others or others have shared with you.

So in this case, I've got three files here shared by me to another person and one folder here shared from another person to me, at least this account.

And it's just a handy place to see all this stuff.

Of course, this is a quick way to access something.

If somebody shared something with you earlier in the day, where did you put it? Where is it? You could just go here and you can find it in shared.

So it's handy if you share a lot of things with other people.

If you don't, then you may also want to just get rid of this item.

Maybe not even have either one of these items here and just start with favorites there at the top.

It's up to you.

If you want to control what's being shared, of course, it doesn't matter if you're looking in shared here or where these files are located.

you control click right click or two finger click on them and you can say like manage shared file and this is where you can manage like how it's shared who it's shared with all those things and basically unshare it so it's not shared with anybody anymore it wouldn't be in this list so that's a look at these top two items here um now let's look at favorites because favorites is probably the most important part of this entire thing favorites is highly customizable whereas the top two things here.

Either have them there or you don't.

Favorites, you can determine a lot of what's there, rearrange them, and you can add your own things.

So under favorites here, I've got applications, desktop, my desktop folders, desktop files, which I've none, documents, my entire documents folder, and I put my downloads folder there as well.

You can start customizing what's under favorites by going into finder settings sidebar.

And then under favorites here, there's a bunch of things you can check or uncheck.

So you can see these four items are checked.

I could add the movies folder if I want.

If you make a lot of videos, you use iMovie a lot, then maybe it's useful to have that there.

Music and pictures.

If you use your pictures folder to share lots of different collections of files and libraries and things like that, and you're always in there, it could make sense to have that there as well, or possibly not.

You can remove an item like I don't use my desktop to store files, so I can just remove it from there.

It's kind of a waste of space since I don't really have anything in it.

So that's how you start customizing.

You can rearrange things in here by dragging and rearranging the order.

That's pretty easy to do.

You could also add your own things there by simply dragging and dropping.

So favorites allows you to put any folder there.

Let's go to the documents folder, and I have a bunch of different folders in here.

And let's say something like my projects folder is one I use constantly.

This is like the main folder where I live in all day long.

So it'll be useful to have it there under favorites.

To add it to favorites, all you need to do is drag it over and position it.

Now notice if you put it over an item, you are indicating you want to move projects into documents where it already is, or move it into downloads.

You don't want to do that.

You want to go between the items and then you see this little circle with the line and that's showing that you want to add it here so i will add the projects folder here maybe there's this current stuff folder i'll add that here maybe there is my examples folder i'll add that here so you could add folders from anywhere that you want including subfolders like here's a little folder inside of examples i could add that if i want so you could add all of these here and what this does is provide quick access to it instead of having to go and figure out where these things are.

Just click and you're right there.

You're right in each of those folders.

And then you can rearrange them, get them in the order you want.

To remove one, all you need to do is drag it enough to the right till you see the little X and it goes away.

Or control click, right click, or two finger click if you prefer the context menu method.

And then you can select remove from sidebar.

I love it when Apple uses very non-ambiguous menu commands like move from sidebar, not remove or delete or something like that.

It's just very clear in telling you it's just removing it from the sidebar.

The examples folder is still there.

It hasn't moved.

Just this little shortcut or alias to it has been removed.

Now, notice how easy it is to add and remove.

I think this is a feature that people don't take enough advantage of.

they see things like this as being very kind of semi-permanent and think oh what folders should i add here i need to think very carefully about this you don't need to think carefully about it if you think you need this folder in the sidebar just add it if a few days later you realize you know i guess i really didn't need this here you can just remove it and the same goes for like if you have a folder like, oh, I don't know, this some files folder right here.

And you say, oh, I'm going to be working.

I rarely work with this folder.

But today I've got a lot of stuff to do in this folder.

You can move it here, have it there for the day.

And then tomorrow or the end of the day, you can get rid of it.

It's so easy to change.

You should be using it dynamically to put the things you want and even like reorder which order they're in and stuff like that.

So favorites is really useful.

Now I should point out for these sections here, if you move your pointer over them, like here, there's this little button that allows you to collapse or expand the section.

So this is handy because like, for instance, locations, you might want all this here, but not all the time.

So you can just collapse it.

But also it's handy to know because I get a lot of people saying, hey, there's nothing under favorites.

Where did all my stuff and favorites go? It's all gone.

Well, it may be that you just accidentally clicked this button here and it's collapsed and you can expand it again.

So important to know that.

Of course, that same interface is used in all sorts of other apps and situations.

So it's like the number one thing to look for when you notice stuff is missing.

It's like, oh, no, it's not missing.

I just collapsed that section.

So, yeah, you've got favorites is the highly customizable part that you should actually be using all the time.

Let's go and take a look at locations, but I am going to have some more tips for favorites later on.

Under locations, you've got these items here, which you customize in settings here, and you have all these items.

a lot of them make sense some of them are kind of a mystery for instance iCloud Drive is the top level of iCloud Drive so if you're always going to the top level of iCloud Drive a lot it might be useful to have this under locations in previous versions of macOS there was a whole section called iCloud it had iCloud Drive the top level and then say desktop and documents under it Apple simplified things by saying well if you want desktop and documents just put them under favorites iCloud drive as a location and it's going to be under locations with other things like your hard disks by select this i see my internal external hard drives there well the external disks are separate here so i've got my internal my external hard disks this is the top level for my mac um this would show any cds dvds or ios devices that are attached if you've got those there'll be an entry for AirDrop here.

Bonjour computers would be using file sharing.

So you could see those or not, but you could also have connected servers using other SMB servers and stuff.

You also can have your trash there or not in the sidebar.

So you can customize what you want here.

What's a mystery is iCloud storage or just cloud storage.

I think this might be if you've got like other cloud storage services, like OneDrive or Google Drive, and I don't have any of that installed.

On my Mac is kind of a mystery too, but I think what it is, is it's if you've got apps, see, and it kind of works in a weird way.

It adds it twice.

If you've got apps that are built for iOS and iPadOS, they may opt, a developer may opt to store things locally on the iPhone or iPad, and that's called On My iPhone or On My iPad.

And if that app is now on the Mac, it may be using the same thing and that's where it might be storing it and i just don't have any apps that do that so um but you've got all these different things locations could almost just be utilities right various things you could have in here a lot of people ask like oh i don't want to have icloud drive here i don't want to have icloud drive up in favorites and you could simply uh do that by dragging icloud drive into favorites and if you put it in favorites it won't be in locations anymore.

So you have that option.

And then the cool thing about that, and even like about the home folder here, you can do that.

You can drag that into favorites, is that once you do that, oh, and it looks like you can't bring the whole home folder back here.

I think what it does is it probably unchecks it.

Yeah, it does.

So now I've got it in both places.

I think what's useful here, moving iCloud Drive up here, is if that's the only thing you need in locations, but you have all this other stuff and you want to shorten the length of the items here you can move icloud drive up to favorites collapse this and be happier with how your sidebar looks and works so you've got that stuff trash is interesting because you would normally drag a file that you want to delete uh let's find a file delete here find a file uh and you want to delete normally drag it to the trash to get rid of it which is in the dock underneath me here but you could drag it to here.

Oh, you can't look at that.

So you cannot drag it there, which makes that kind of useless, except that you can go to it to see what's currently in your trash.

So useful there.

I wish you could drag to it.

But speaking of dragging, I guess this is a good time to bring up the fact that one of the cool things you can do besides using this as a way to jump to different folders is you can drag and drop things into folders.

So here I am in that current stuff folder.

Actually, let me go back up here to this level and say, I'm going to go to other.

And here's this file.

I could drag it into current stuff.

If I see the folder in the same finder window, or if I see it in another finder window, but I could also drag it into current stuff by using the sidebar here.

That's like, for some people is the main reason why they use items and favorites.

you've got a place where stuff goes, you can easily drag and drop into the left sidebar all the time.

And it's also really useful to do it temporarily.

Like for instance, if you want to get organized and you're going to drag a bunch of stuff into the folder named screenshots, move it to the favorite section temporarily.

Now go through whatever you've got, whatever you're and drag stuff into screenshots like that really quick and easy to do.

And then like you're done with your cleanup, you could say, well, I don't need it there anymore and get rid of it.

It's a really easy way to move things around, dragging your target into favorites and using it as a kind of a drop zone place.

So let's move on to tags here, this section here at the bottom.

So if I expand tags, I see a bunch of these tags.

And the idea is if I select a tag, it's going to show me the items in that tag.

And I can view them any way I want.

I'll just do list you there.

Let me see all the things that are tagged red, the things that are tagged orange, and all of that.

So if you've been tagging things, it's a really quick way to basically do a search for everything with that tag.

And that's most of what this does.

This item here at the bottom is called all tags.

If you select it, you get this column here that lists all of your tags.

And you can use this as a way to see your tags very quickly and easily.

So you can very easily see these things and go through your tags, which files are tagged with various things.

Now, you do have some controls here under settings.

You've got at the bottom tags and you can turn on recent tags.

So these tags that are listed are predetermined.

But recent tags means it's going to show you recents as well, like tags you've recently been using.

So if we go into Finder Settings and we go to Tags, these checkboxes here, this is what shows up here in the sidebar.

So if I uncheck orange, orange goes away.

so you can put the tags you use all the time here with these check boxes and remove the ones you never want to see kind of in this context if you have 400 tags which some of us do you could just have the 10 that you actually want to see all the time here so tags it's a really interesting way to be able to access your tags you don't need to use uh the sidebar to do that but it comes in really handy if you use tags a lot to just jump to see what each tag is.

A useful kind of thing that you can do is you can create a tag.

Let's go back to documents here.

Let's create a tag called favorites and we're just going to name it favorites.

That's our own name we're coming up with.

It's not something special in the system.

So I'm going to control click on this and click tags and say, I'll actually call it favorite, right? And I will create that tag.

And this item here, if I look at it, it's got favorite right there.

If I go to finder settings, tags, I'll find favorite.

Matter of fact, I can set a color for it.

Let's set a color of red.

Now, the cool thing is I've got this red favorites here.

I could also go into this list here, find favorite, check it, say I do want it to be shown here, and drag it to the top.

So it's the top one.

Now I have a really cool way to make some of my files favorites.

Like I'll make this one a favorite here.

And I'll make let's go into another folder here and let's say I'll make this one a favorite as well and now if I click here I can see my favorites and I could change the view and have it like that so that could be a really cool way of seeing this it would be great if you could drag this up into favorites but even without that you have this really cool way to basically collect files from over the place and favorite them as well as folders.

So a cool thing you could do there, which leads me into talking about more things you could do with favorites here in the sidebar.

Let's go back to documents here.

And I already showed that you can add things here, jump to the different folders.

You can drag and drop into folders.

You could also add files here.

So the key is if you try to drag a file like this here, this will mean I drag it into the folder.

I want to drag it so it appears in favorites, but it doesn't seem to be a way to do that like you can with folders.

The key is to hold down the command key, and now you have the ability to add a file here.

So what can you do with that? Well, you can simply click it, and it's a one-click open the app open the file thing to get access to that file so you can use favorites to place some of your items you've got to hold the command key down whenever even if you're just moving this around so yeah you can have a few you don't want to have too many but you can have a few files shown here that's also true of applications which is weird you have all these different ways to launch applications.

But like if you have a favorite application like this one, holding the command key down allows you to add the application to the sidebar.

So now you can click and launch the application from the sidebar.

Again, you don't want to have too many of these because it'll take up a lot of space and you already have a great way to launch your favorite applications with the dock.

So, you know, it's marginal use.

You can't even drag and drop like you can with the doc to use it.

But, you know, it's there if you just want another way to have applications or a specific file accessed like that.

So, let's see, I have some other tips here before I get into talking about the last topic, which is recent.

and then I'm going to look through the comments and answer questions.

You've got the, let's see, you've got different ways to, if you want to get rid of a section, like say you don't want locations here, here's a tip, you can go through and just get rid of everything under locations and it goes away.

Once it has nothing to display, the section goes away.

So it's really handy as if you just want to eliminate an entire section, like either favorites or locations like that.

And by the way, before I give a few more tips, I do want to point out that if you find videos like this and all the rest of my tutorials valuable, consider joining my Patreon.

Patrons get exclusive content, course discounts, and more.

And you can just, you know, if you go here, you can just read about it and see what it's about.

So check that out if you want to support MacMost.

Here are some more tips here.

You can drag and reorder the sections if you want locations to be at the top.

You can click and drag locations and put it up here.

It's kind of a little glitchy, but you could do it.

Oh, I ended up dragging tags.

Oh, so there's tags at the top, I could get tags at the bottom, locations now at the top, that kind of thing.

So you can reorder the sections.

Also, if you want to increase the font size here, it's a little tricky, but you can go into system settings and you go into accessibility and display.

Now, if you go to text size, you've got the ability to change the text size for the finder, which you think would change this.

It doesn't.

If I change the Finder text size, notice the text size of the content changes, but not the sidebar.

However, this slider here at the top, you slide that, it changes the text size of things in various places like in settings, but also here in the sidebar.

So you can make the sidebar bigger or smaller.

I know a lot of that depends on your screen resolution and how it works with your eyes and stuff.

But that is one change you can make to it like that.

so um let's take a look at recents because as i showed before there were a bunch of disadvantages to it which is one is you don't see things uh look i've got this thing in downloads right here from today and if i look at recents it's not there which is frustrating for some people because it's not open i've never opened that file so it's not going to appear here for date last opened in addition you may want different things and you may be confused about why some things are occluded and other things are not this is just a search so you can do your own search to do that search where you want so if you just want documents in the documents folder you could do that if you want to instead go say to the home folder which would include everything in here you can do that If you want to look for iCloud Drive files just there, you can do that.

I'm going to, since I'm really organized with everything under documents, which is something I highly recommend, I really want to just see stuff that's in here.

If something has been downloaded, I know to look in downloads.

I'm not searching for it elsewhere.

But documents, that's where I want to see all my recent files.

So I'll start with documents and I will do a command F or a file find.

And what I'm going to do is say, well, here's what I want.

instead of kind is any i'm going to say kind is a document um and that's really useful uh but sometimes it doesn't list everything so i'm going to option click here the plus changes to three dots and say if any of these following are true kind is a document and then add another one or Let's say that the name ends with, and the thing it's not going to show me as a document is.zip file.

So all my recent documents or zip files, and you could add more here.

And then I'm also going to click with the option key held down for three dots and say, if any of these following are true, the last open date is within the last 30 days.

Yeah, but also the last or the date added.

And you have to go to other, search for date, and there's date added.

Date added is within the last 30 days.

And then maybe I'll do also if the last modified date is within the last 30 days.

So you can highly customize what you want.

I don't need this first one here anymore so I can get rid of it.

But if any of these true and any of the following are true, then it's going to put the results here.

And I'm going to sort it by, let's see, date last opened.

And this is great.

This is what I want.

So now I hit the save button.

And this will save it as a saved search in my saved searches folder.

I'll call it my recents.

And I'm going to make sure add to sidebars checked.

So now I've got my recents here.

I can move it to the top of favorites and I could select that.

So instead of this recents, I've got this recents.

And imagine how you can customize this.

If I control click, right click or two finger click here, I can select show search criteria and I can modify this.

So maybe it's not every 30 days, maybe it's every 90 days, or maybe it's every 10 days.

Maybe the kind is only going to be, like if I'm a writer, maybe it's just pages and Word documents.

That's all I want to see there.

so you can highly customize this and create your own recents and then you can get rid of this recents here from the top and let's say if you don't need share it either and you have something more useful to you or you can create multiple ones of these and have something called recent uh you know word processing documents or recent pages documents another one called recent everything else or recent developer documents you know whatever it is you want you can have a couple of different recents that do different things in different ways.

And you can define it and go to town with all of the different criteria and stuff like that.

So that's an important skill to know creating these.

These are also called smart folders, safe searches, smart folders, the same thing, the same feature with two different names and really useful for creating things that then appear in the sidebar and either show recents or you know you can create one let's do another one let's do under documents I will do command f for find and let's say under documents kind is and I'll say pdf and I'll add last modified date is within the last 60 days and then I will save and call this recent PDFs, add to sidebar.

There we go.

So if this is useful to you, you can add this and create a safe search like this.

And you can use all the different search criteria.

So really useful.

Let's take a look at some questions here.

Looking over here, let's see.

Going backwards.

Yes, this is the main here on YouTube.

for you to review at any speed you want.

Should you delete the red, orange, and yellow tags that come by default? No, because now they're used for coloring folders.

So create your own tags.

Just leave those alone to be used for folder colors.

Even if you don't use folder colors, I just, I, you know, they're kind of required there.

I think if we delete them, they'll recreate themselves at some point.

So just leave the default color ones there.

That doesn't prevent you from doing anything else and not using the color ones at all.

But at this point, because the system's using them for something, I wouldn't get rid of them.

Let's see.

that's a good question here um how do you figure out these things i know you know maybe not asking it completely seriously but you know i play around and experiment with all this stuff all the time i encourage you to do the same um you know i'm always selecting files getting info create example files, create demo files, duplicate files for things you've got.

So you're not using the originals and try different things.

In the case of the sidebar, try dragging things to it, away from it, going through all the different settings and seeing what's there.

And you always discover something interesting that you can use.

And that's basically what I do to discover this stuff.

No special way.

There's no special thing I'm reading or whatever.

I experiment a lot.

Someone says, living in the project folder, I tend to live in my notes project folder.

What's the difference? Well, do you mean notes in the notes app? Because if you mean notes in the notes app, that's just your notes.

This is dealing with files.

So pages documents, numbers documents, Word documents, PDFs, things like that.

But inside your documents folder, you can create whatever you want.

Every single folder you see here in the documents folder is something I made, came up with a name for, and then use that.

And that is basically everything here.

You can do whatever you want.

Your documents folder is a blank slate for you to work with and create things.

Use longer file names, have folders inside of folders, come up with your organizational structure and modify it over time.

I just prefer to put everything in the documents folder and then organize under that.

And that's kind of what I recommend to everybody.

It's really useful for a lot of different things.

Like one of them is if you wanted to take a copy of everything that's important to you, or if I wanted to do that, all I would need to do is actually copy my documents folder.

Everything's in there.

So it's a really nice way to organize the things like kind of, you know, if you want to have standards and best practices is a term people throw around, I'd say best practice is documents folder, everything under that, but organized to your heart's delight with subfolders inside the documents folder.

So yeah, that seems to be most of the questions there, but please do, you know, ask questions at macmost.com slash ask.

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