Mac Basics: Using the Finder’s Four Views

Hi, this is Gary with MacMost.com. Today, let me show you how to use the four Finder views.

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So when you use the Finder on your Mac to view files and folders there are four different views that you could use to see what's there. To bring up a Finder window I have to be in the Finder and I can go to Finder, New Finder Window. But also if I switch to it in the Dock and I have no Finder window open it will automatically open one. So you can see here I've got the Finder window open and I'm using what's called Icon View. I see large icons here in the Finder window. At the top of the screen it will show me what folder I'm in. In this case my Documents folder. Then I'll see icons here for the four Finder views. Now if my Finder window is small, like if I shrink this, instead I'll see a button here that I can click and choose which view I want. It's only if I have enough space that I'll actually see them as four individual buttons here grouped together. 

So first let's look at this Icon View. In a typical icon view you've got these large icons that show you what the file contains and also you can drag them around and place them where you want. So it gives you the ability to be creative in how you arrange things. Notice I've grouped all of these images here. I've got some folders here maybe grouped together with another file. I can do whatever I want and move them to any spot I want. But if I go to the View Menu I can control that a bit. For instance I can go to Clean Up which will  snap each icon to a spot on a grid so everything doesn't look so cluttered. I can also do Clean Up By and choose one of these options and it will sort everything, say by name, and snap them all to a grid. Using Clean Up and Clean Up By will move the icons so they are in different spots. But instead if I use Sort By and choose something like Name then you could see everything is arranged by name. I can't actually arrange things manually because it's always going to put them back in name order. But if I were to go to View, Sort By None it remembers the previous positions I had things in. So you could switch back and forth between your own custom design and using Sort By and choosing one of these. You could also use Snap To Grid and then anytime you move an item it's going to snap it to its grid position. Then you could just go to Sort By None to turn that off.

Now let's go to the next Finder View which is List View. List View is very different. You see everything in one list and there are columns. Typically you'll see Name, Date Modified, Size, and Kind. Now you can sort by these columns very easily. Notice next to Name there's this little up arrow here. That's telling me that the files are now sorted by name, alphabetically in ascending order. So if I were to click it again you could see that changes direction and now everything is sorted in the opposite direction. I can click again to change the sort order. I can sort by Date Modified by clicking there and clicking twice will change the order as well. The same thing with Size or Kind. Now I can change which columns appear here several ways. An easy way is to two finger click, right click, or Control click on anyone of these column titles here and I can add a new column. So, for instance, I could add a Date Created column and you could see it appear here. I have Date Modified, Date Created, Size, and Kind. I can change the width of any column by grabbing the line between the columns and dragging left or right. In addition I could click the little reveal arrow to the left of a folder to open up the folder and see what's inside. So you can see I can do it with these folders and dig down even further into some of them.

So now let's look at the third view, Column View. Column View puts all of your files in one list but not giving you extra columns like size, date modified, and things like that. But when you select a folder you get another column with the contents of that folder. You can continue down to look at another folder. So it allows you to quickly navigate through a complex file structure. So I can be looking for these files but suddenly I want to jump to this folder here. I can click on it and now things change and I can view what's in there. The last column here is the Preview area. If I select a file then I get a preview of that file all the way over here on the right. It works for just about any file type. So for instance an image. I can see what's in the image. It will even work for videos, sounds, all sorts of different files types. You'll see further information about the file below the preview.

Now the fourth view type is Gallery View. This is a specialized view that's really meant for viewing a folder full of images or perhaps other media where you could see easily down here exactly what you've got. So I can click on this one, for instance, and now I get a nice big preview of it. I can use the arrow keys to go back and forth. So if you have a folder full of images that you want to look through quickly, Gallery View is what you want. Otherwise, for most other file types, you want either Icon, List, or Column View. 

There are lots of options for all of these views. For instance that Preview area that we saw in Column View you can get it in Icon and List View by simply going to View, and then Show Preview. So now you could see any file that I select, I'll see the Preview there just like in Column View. You could turn that Off by going to View, Hide Preview. You also have more options for each view if you go to View, and then Show View Options, or Command J. This brings up this special set of Controls here. It's different for every view. So here in Icon View, for instance, I can access some of the things like Group By and Sort By that we saw in the View Menu. I could also do things like change the icon size, change the grid spacing, change the text size that appears underneath each icon, and even make the label position be on the right instead of on the bottom, show additional information. Things like that. In Icon View you can even set a color for the background. So instead of using just white I can set it to a different color for that folder. If I switch to List View you could see I get a different set of options here. I only have two different icon sizes. I have Text Size and I can control which columns are shown. In Column View it's a different set again. In Gallery View I can set the Thumbnail size for the thumbnails at the bottom. So I can make them larger if I need that. 

Another thing you can use in all of the views is the Group By feature. So you can go to View, Use Groups, and now you've got Group By. You can set a grouping. So I have Kind here. You can see all the folders first, all the documents next, images next. You could change the grouping to something else like say Date Last Opened and it will group them into things like Today, Previous Seven Days, Thirty Days, and different Months and Years. Grouping even works in Icon View where you can have things grouped like this and in Column View as well where they're grouped in each column. 

So which view should you be using. Well, that's up to you, your personal preference, but also what you're looking at. Each one is better for different situations. Personally I only ever use the List View and Column View. Most of the time I use the Column View. It allows me to navigate around very quickly to find what I want. If I need to see more information about files, like sorting by file size, then I of course go to List View. If I'm looking at a folder that's filled with images and I need to flip through them really quickly I'll use Gallery View. But a lot of people prefer the customization of Icon View. Being able to group things spacially in a window works best for what they're doing. But it's easy to switch between these views. I encourage you to get out of your comfort zone sometimes and try some of the other views for a little while to see what benefits it could bring.