Mac Basics: The Desktop Folder

Hi, this is Gary with MacMost.com. Today let's take a look at the Desktop Folder. MacMost is brought to you thanks to a great group of more than 900 supporters. Go to MacMost.com/patreon. There you can read more about the Patreon Campaign. Join us and get exclusive content and course discounts.

Now the Desktop Folder can be a little confusing for some users because you see the same files and folders that are in the Desktop Folder in two different places. So the Desktop Folder is basically the same as any other folder on your Mac. You can find it in one of two places depending upon your settings. If we look in the Finder in your hard drive under Users and in your Home folder you'll see a variety of folders there. For some users you'll see a Documents folder and a Desktop folder. However for other users neither of those folders will be here in your Home folder because you're using iCloud Drive. If that's the case you go to iCloud Drive and you'll see Documents and Desktop there. The setting for that is, of course, in System Preferences under your Apple ID, iCloud Drive Options, and if you have Documents & Desktop options turned on. Most Mac users now have that turned On so both of those folders are in iCloud Drive. You can see them across all of your Macs and even access them on your iPhone or iPad.

Now the Desktop Folder is just a regular folder in here. You go into it you'll see files, maybe other folders as well just like with any other folder. There's really nothing special about it when looking at it this way. However, what makes it different is that any files and folders in the Desktop Folder will also be shown on your Desktop. You can see them here right over my Desktop background in the upper right hand corner. It's important to realize that these are the same files. I'm just looking at a list of those files in two different ways. One I'm looking at them here in a Finder window. The other I'm seeing them sitting by themselves on the Desktop. These are exactly the same files. For instance, if I were to change the name of this file right here you could see it changes there. They are the same files. Just two ways of accessing them. 

Seeing them on the Desktop instead of the Finder window is very similar to viewing them in Icon View. So I see the same icons here in the Finder as I do here. Of course in the Finder I could also look in List View, Column View, and Gallery View at those files. But on the Desktop I only see them as icons. They also have separate arrangements here. So, for instance, if I move the files around here in the Finder window it doesn't change where they are positioned here on the Desktop. I can move them around here on the Desktop and that doesn't change this either. If I clean these up by selecting View, Clean Up By, and let's cleanup by Name it doesn't change it here. I can Control click or Right Click here. I can Click on the Desktop to select the Desktop and do the same thing. Cleanup By Name and it will put them on a grid sorted by name in that case. 

Now to make things more confusing the Desktop can show other things as well. So in the Finder if I go to Finder Preferences, under General there's Show These Items on the Desktop. I can select something like Hard Disks which will show my Internal Drive. Also External Disks which will show any external drives connected. You can see how those things appear there on the Desktop but they don't appear here in the Finder. The Finder only shows you the actual files and folders like any other location. But the Desktop is special. The Desktop will combine the files and folders in the Desktop Folder with other things that you select here. 

You can modify views on the Desktop just like you can in the Finder. So here in this Finder window, for instance, if I go to View, Show View Options I can choose things like the Grid Spacing, the Text Size for the text there, whether an icon is shown or not, the Label position, things like that. So you click on the Desktop and those controls then apply to the File icons on the Desktop. So you can change the text size, label position, grid spacing, and other things. 

Another thing you can do with the Desktop that you really can't do anywhere else in the Finder is to do something on Desktop Stacks. So when you have a bunch of files cluttering your Desktop you can clean it up a bit by going to View, and then Use Stacks.  That will group things together by Kind. So I've got images. Throw a bunch of images there and it throws them altogether as one icon. I click that icon and it expands to show me all of them. Click again and it will shrink them into this one icon. You could change stacks to group by something else other than Kind. Like by Date Last Opened, or by Date Modified, Date Created or Tags that you've created. So you can pretty much setup your own system. Then you can just turn if off pretty easily and they all go back to their positions. 

So what you use the Desktop Folder for and when that's kind of a personal preference. I prefer not to use it at all if possible. I don't store files there. I sort all of my files in the Documents folder in subfolders well organized. I don't put anything on the Desktop. I see other people with very crowded Desktops with dozens of files on them and I think that could really hurt productivity. However, I do occasionally use it in a way other people do as well for temporary storage of files. Say you need to create a document quickly. You have an idea. You open up a new TextEdit or Pages document. You write something. You haven't thought about where you're going to store it yet in Documents but want to save the file. You can save it to the Desktop with the idea that in an hour or two or maybe tomorrow you're going to move it to the Documents folder. In some cases people may want to have one or two files on the Desktop if they're extremely frequently accessed. Like an example might be an author that is writing a novel and is going to be basically be working in one Pages or Word document for months on end. Having that right there on the Desktop may make sense since that document is more important and more frequently accessed than anything else they are using by far. 

The bottom line is you could really use it as you want. If you want to put a lot of things on your Desktop and organize using stacks or maybe create folders on your Desktop and put files in there you can. I prefer to put things in the Documents folder and leave the Desktop clean. But you've got to decide for yourself how you best want to use the Desktop Folder, the Documents Folder, and other places to store your files.