Viewing by Groups in the Mac Finder

When viewing files in the Finder you can group the items in a folder by kind, size, date and more. How this works depends on which Finder view you choose. You can also sort the files inside each group.

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Video Transcript: Hi, this is Gary with MacMost.com. Let's take a look at using Groups in Finder Windows.
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So when looking at your files in the Finder you can, of course, sort your files in a variety of different ways. By name, by size, by kind, etc. In addition to that you can also Group items together. Here in the Finder I'm looking at a folder called Projects. I've got a whole bunch of  different files and folders in here. If I go to View and then Sort By this is where I can sort. You can see I've got Sort By Name. Let's Sort by Size. You can see here now with the Size column that it is sorted with the largest files at the top. I can also just use the column headings here. Like Name, click on it once and it sorts it by size and it again and it reverses the sort. You can see the little arrow here indicating the direction. So for most people this is all you really need. You can just continue to sort by size, name, whatever and you can find the files you want. 
However there is another option. If you go to View there is something called Use Groups. Now a few versions of macOS back this was called Arranged By. You had the choice to Sort By or Arrange By which was very confusing. You had lots of people that were using Arrange By when they just wanted to sort the list of files. So when Apple changed this from Arrange By to Use Groups it made it a lot clearer to a lot of people and there was less confusion. But the functionality is basically the same. You turn it on by selecting Use Groups here. Once you do you notice that everything in the window is now grouped. So there is a bunch of folders here. There's Applications. There's Documents, Images and so on. As many groups as you have for the files in this folder. 
Now if you go back to the View Menu you'll notice that Sort By changed to Grouped By. So you're no longer sorting. You're grouping. In this case it is set to Kind. It's grouping by kind. But you could choose something else. Like, for instance, let's choose Date Modified. Now you could see here I've got a Group at the top that's previous 7 days. Then January, then 2022, then 2021, and so on. The groups will automatically form based on the date ranges that you have present in the folder. You could also go to Group By and choose something like Size. Now you could see here at the top I've got the largest files here from 10 to 100 MB. Then I've got a group from 1 to 10 MB, from 100K to 1 MB. So on. You've got other options here as well. Like, for instance, Applications. When you do this you're going to get things grouped according to the Application that will open by default. So here's something from Automator, here's Keynote, here's word documents, Music files, Numbers, always a big group for Other including folders, here's all my Pages documents, and here's all the Preview documents, and so on. So they are by Application which is going to be different than Kind. When you do Group By Kind then you'll have groups like all Images will be together, all movies will be together, all documents will be together.
Now one of the things that's confusing is the order in which the files appear inside the groups. So, for instance, in Documents here when grouped by Kind notice that it is alphabetical order. But it doesn't have to be. I could still use the column headings here and say Sort By Size. So now the groups remain intact. With all the documents grouped here they are now sorted by size. So you can see 6.3MB at the top to 91 bytes at the bottom. So the sorting takes place inside the groups. Now you can also access this in the View Menu by going to Group By and holding down the Option Key and you can see Sort Groups By and this is just a way to access in the Menu the same thing you can do here by clicking on the heading above the column. 
Now Grouping works in the three main Finder Views. Now I've been showing you List View. But let's go to Column View. Now you can see here the grouping that is by Modified Date holds for all the columns. So I've got all the groups here in this column and then I've selected the Projects Folder and I've got the same groups here in the Projects Folder. If I were to change to Group By, say, Kind you could see here that I've got Kind here in this column and then also Kind here in the next column. That's pretty straight forward. What is interesting is if you switch to Icon View. So here I'm in the Projects Folder and you can see I've got Group By set to Kind and I've got these rows now with folders as the first row, then Applications, Documents, and so on. If you look at the rows they extend off to the right and I can use my trackpad or the top of my mouse to scroll through all of the items here. So I can go down to Images here and I can scroll through the images. It creates an interesting way to view your files with each grouping being exactly the same height. So it could be easier to find smaller groups, like Presentations here, even if you have a ton of documents and images. 
Now note you don't always have to go to the View Menu here to change the groupings. You can go here to this little icon in the Tool Bar. Click on that and you can choose the grouping there. If you set it to None either here or in the View Menu it basically turns grouping Off. So I can go to View, Use Groups, and then when I go to View Group By if I say None it is the same thing as turning groups Off. You can see it is Off there. Once it is Off then selecting one of these in the Tool Bar, like Date Modified, will turn Grouping on and set Grouping to that type. 
Now often people get stuck in Grouping here and will go down and try to use Group By and Sort By something and not get satisfactory results. Remember if you just want to see everything in a list and sort it by name or sort it by file size turn Groups Off. Then go ahead and use Sort By and Sort By whatever it is you want to sort all the files and folders in that location altogether. So if ever you have an arrangement of files in the Finder that doesn't seem to make sense the first thing to check is the View Menu and see if you have Use Groups turned On. If so turn it Off and then sort it by whatever you want to get things in an order that makes sense. 
So there are a couple of interesting little notes about Grouping. One is that if you go to the Applications folder, you've got all your Applications, and if you look then under Use Groups and set Group By you notice the list is different. So you can certainly say something like Date Last Opened and then it will group all your Applications by Applications you opened today, yesterday, previous 7 days, and so on. But you could also go and Group By Application Category. Something that is not available in other regular folders. When you do that you'll see everything has this category here. These Categories come from things that the developer sets when they make their app. So it is the Application developer that gets to say what category their app is in. You can't change it. For the most part these match up to the categories you'll find in The App Store. 
Note you can also use this when searching. So if you do a search, like I've done here, and you've got your Search results, you can click here and choose a way to group all of the files together or you can use View and turn on Use Groups, Group By in the search results here. So even if you don't use it for viewing your folders in a regular way it can come in handy to group together things in search results. 
Another interesting thing about Groups is this Group By Name. What's this for? Well, your guess is as good as mine. If you choose Group By Name it's basically putting everything in one big group and then sorting it as you want. Which can create confusing results. Remember I had this sorted by Date Modified here and it is still sorting the one group by Date Modified. Which creates this nonsensical list here. I've just said Group By Name yet I'm not getting anything by name here. It's by Date Modified. Let's Sort By Name, as usual, now you can see that I'm using Groups, I have it Group By Name, and then I'm using the sorting inside the Groups By Name and I get an alphabetical list. That's great. But I'm not really sure what the purpose is. Notice here in List View it looks like regular List View except I can't actually dive down into the files. If I were to turn this Off by turning Off Use Groups or setting Group By to None now I get basically the same list except now I can actually use List View as it is intended by opening up folders like that. 
Note there is one other type of grouping you can use. That's to group just the folders together separate from the files. To do that what you want to do is turn Off Groups. Than Sort By Name. It only works if Groups are Off and you sort by name. You can then go to Finder Settings and then under Advanced you can turn On Keep Folders On Top In Windows When Sorting By Name. Turn that On and now you've always grouped your folders here at the top and your files below that. Even though they are sorted by name the folders are Sorted By Name first and then the rest of the files are Sorted By Name. 
Hope you found this useful. Thanks for watching.

Comments: 3 Responses to “Viewing by Groups in the Mac Finder”

Ken Nellis

2 years ago

Great! I *had* got "stuck" in group mode and hadn’t known how to return to what I wanted. Now, I know. Thanx!

nick

Gary, somewhat related...is there a way to force Finder to save a view? One of the first things I usually do when using Finder is to resize the column where files are listed, for example I double-click the resize handle so that the column width automatically resizes so I can read long file names. It would be handy to have this viewing preference saved. Thanks.

Gary Rosenzweig

Nick: It remembers for each folder, but not the column widths. Those are dynamic.

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Viewing by Groups in the Mac Finder

Comments: 3 Responses to “Viewing by Groups in the Mac Finder”

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