Understanding the Recents Folder On a Mac

When you click on Recents in the Finder, you get a huge list of all of your files. This is the result of a search, and not a separate location for these files. Recents is useful for quick access to the files you were just working on, but shouldn't be used for deleting or organizing files. You can also search with Recents as a starting point for a more specific search. You can disable Recents in the sideba or create your own version using a Saved Search.

Check out Understanding the Recents Folder On a Mac at YouTube for closed captioning and more options.

Video Transcript: Hi, this is Gary with MacMost.com. Today let's take a look at the Recents folder in the Finder on your Mac.
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So when you look in the Finder you'll see, to the left, Favorites. If you don't see anything listed under Favorites click the Show/Hide button here. You'll see a variety of things underneath that. One of those things you may see is Recents. When you click it you get a list of tons of files. As a matter of fact it may appear to show all the files that you've got. What you're actually looking at here is a list of all the files you have in your Home folder and in iCloud Drive all sorted by Date Last Opened. You could see here a sort column and it says Date Last Opened sorted by descending. So the most recent file that you opened is going to be at the top. As a matter of fact in the past this Recents folder was called All My Files which is actually a more appropriate name for it.
Now you may see is in Icon View or in the Column View instead. But List View is the easiest way to view these files. So what is this Recents folder? Well, it's not a folder at all. In fact it's the results of a Search. So think of it as if you did a search for all of your files and simply sorted them by most recently opened first. It's not going to show you system files or system library files or files from other users on your computer. Just your files. Files you've created. Files you've downloaded. Files you've exported. They could be in your Documents folder. It could be in other folders you've created in your Home folder. They could be in all the folders of iCloud Drive. Anything you've got that you've created, saved, or exported is going to be here.
So to demonstrate this I'm going to go to View and then Show Path Bar. This shows, at the bottom, the path of any file selected. So if I selected this file I can see it's in my Downloads folder. If I selected this file I can see it's in iCloud Drive, Pages. This file is in iCloud Drive, Documents. So every file here is from someplace I stored files. They are just all gathered together and sorted. I can change the sort order if I want. So Sort By Name, Sort By Kind, but Date Last Opened, Descending makes the most sense. It fits with the name Recents. 
So it's important to realize these are not duplicate files. This file here is actually on iCloud Drive, Documents and it's sitting there as Info.rtf. It's not in a folder called Recents. There is no folder called Recents. Recents is the result of a Search. You probably know that Command F does a search. So if I go to my Documents folder here and do Command F for Search you'll see a blank search. Nothing here. Kind is Any and there's nothing here. You'd think that all your files would be listed there because the Kind is any kind of file. But in fact you get the opposite. You get no files at all until you actually fill something out like a keyword to search for.
However, if you go to Go and look at the Shortcut for Recents it's Shift Command F. So if you do want to do a search for all of your files Shift Command F goes to the Recents folder and it gives you the results of a search for everything. Since these aren't duplicates and just the result of a search you want to be careful not to delete things from here. I've heard horror stories of people that go and look in this Recents folder and think these are duplicates. Select everything, Command A, and then delete! It's deleting all their files from all these different locations on their drive.
By the way here's a handy tip. If you select several files from here and then you move them to the Trash or use Command Delete you can reverse that by simply using Command Z to Undo. Or if you do Command Delete and then you go to the Trash you'll find those files there. You can select them all, go to File, and then select Put Back and it will put each one of those back into its original location. So you can see each one here in its enclosing folder and the Trash is empty. 
So what's this for? Well, it's very useful if you just want to get back to working on files that you were recently using. For instance, say it's the end of the day. You've closed all of your documents and then you return the next morning and you want to continue working on the same documents you were working on the previous day. Well going into Recents will probably show those files here at the very top. Also, it's very easy to just look things up. If you know you were looking at a file last Monday you can look through here by date and quickly find that file.
There's also certain things that you can do with the files in here. For instance, if I select a file I can use Command and Down and it will open the file. Or you could just have used Command and O which is the Finder shortcut for Open. But you could also go to the location of that file with Command Up Arrow and that takes you to the enclosing folder for that file. Now if you're like me and you don't really have a use for this Recents folder you don't have to keep looking at it here. You can go to Finder Preferences and then from there you can turn Off Recents. Also if you go to General you'll see New Finder Windows Show and you may have it set to Recents. You can change that to a specific location like I have it set to Documents instead. Then the only place you would see it is under Go. There is the shortcut to Recents and you could use Shift Command F. But you can just ignore that. There's no way to get rid of that and it could come in handy to use Shift Command F to get a listing of all your files.
It's often asked if there's a way to clear this and the answer, of course, is No. This is the results of a search that searches for all of your files. Well, there's no way to clear that out. It's the results of a search. The question what are all of my files is always the same.
Now you can modify this if you want. You can use the search field to actually search for something within Recents. So, for instance, I could search for all the files that have the word test either in them or in the name or select Name Matches test and now it's just files that have that in the name. I'm still searching in Recents. Now you may be searching This Mac instead of Recents. You can control which one of these two is on by default by going to Finder, Preferences, and then Advanced, and then When Performing Search, search the current folder instead of searching This Mac or the previous Scope.
Now unlike regular Finder search you don't get the ability to add more criteria here. But you can type some criteria. So for instance I could do Name colon and then something like test and it's going to give me all the files that have that in the name. But I could also do Kind and use words like image and it will show me all the images. But I could also use Kind and then a file extension like that and I can then select that there. I could also use Created or Modified and then followed by a colon and then give it a date. So I could say 6/1/2020 and it will find anything that's modified on that specific date. I can use less than to look for things modified before then and greater than for after that.
You can combine any of these using and or or. So I could do something like Name colon test or Name colon project to find all the files that either have test or project in the name. You can even use parentheses and additional things. So I could look for something where the name matches one thing or the other thing and if Kind, image.
Now if you like this search you could always click Save here and then do a Save Search with the checkbox at the sidebar. You put the Saved Search to the sidebar here so you can do this for searches in Recent. You could also use a Saved Search to do create something like Recents that's a little bit different. For instance if you like the idea of Recents but you only want it to show things in the Documents folder and nowhere else. Go to your Documents folder, do Command F for a search, and then do a search from here or define a Kind like Kind is Document,or perhaps leave Kind as Any but something else that will just give you all the files like, for instance, Last Opened Date is within the last 9,999 days. Then you could hit Save here and save this as something like Recents in Documents. Now when I hit Save this is here. I can move it to the top and now it replaces my Recents folder there with Recents in Documents.
So there's everything you need to know about Recents in the Finder. For some people it's useful. For others it isn't. If it's not you can simply remove it from the Sidebar and forget it's even there.

Comments: 11 Responses to “Understanding the Recents Folder On a Mac”

nick

6 months ago

hi Gary, just tried this and opened a coupe files from Finder, however after closing these files I expected to see them listed at the top of the Recents Folder, but I don’t. I’m sure I missed something, but should I not be seeing these files listed at the top? thx

Gary Rosenzweig

Nick: What do you mean by “tried this?” If you mean one of my suggestions for setting up your own Recents-like folder, then it could be how you have it set up. For instance, if you are using Date Created or Date Modified, then simply opening a file won’t change those times.

Should have been more explicit, by tried I meant I turned on the option to view the Recents folder and then opened a few files, however I hadn’t noticed that Finder was not listing them by Last Date Opened, so when I made sure that option was selected, then it listed the most recent opened files correctly. I think this feature is really handy because many times I find myself navigating through folders to look for recent files I worked on. Thanks.

Jerry

I don’t see a recents option in favorites.

Jerry: You probably have it turned off. Finder, Preferences, Sidebar.

Bob J

5 months ago

A while back, my recents folder stopped working. Nothing shows up. How can I fix this?

Bob: Stopped working… how? What does it do now?

Jon

1 month ago

I was curious, are the RECENT ITEMS list stored somewhere in the Mac, going back years? I know there are these various “Plists” I believe they are called, that log the names and times that various drives have been connected and removed. I just wondered, if there was some SAVED MASTER LIST of every item, opened up on the MAC, going back months, years. Let me know. Thanks

Jon: I think it only stores the numbers of items that you have specified. So it wouldn’t have a long list at all. Not sure where it is kept, probably deep in your user Library folder.

scott silverman

1 week ago

where are the actual files that are shown in finder? i don’t want to lose any files.

Scott: Select the file, then look at the bottom of the Finder window to see the path. If you don’t see it, choose View, Show Path Bar. Or, you can select a file and use File, Show In Enclosing Folder.

Understanding the Recents Folder On a Mac

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