 If you are new to the Mac, or maybe you've just upgraded to a new Mac, then this video is all about setting up the finder, and so I'll be sharing a few little tips and tricks for how to do that effectively. Hello and welcome to Take One Tech. My name's Alec, and this week I upgraded my computer after quite some time, and I upgraded to one of the new M1 Mac Mini, well they're not new at this point, are they? Let's face it, it's a 2020 M1 Mac Mini, but it's new to me, and it's certainly going to help me give a little performance boost. I got tired of waiting for the 16-inch M series MacBook Pro, so I just thought I'll just get the Mac Mini instead. And as it happens, my other laptop that I had been using up until this point, my mobile laptop that I can take with me on the go everywhere, has not moved from its little stand on my desk for well over 12 months now. So I think I'm safe with a desk-bound Mac Mini for the moment. So anyway, having gone through the process of upgrading and installing things, I thought what I'd do is I'd just share with you some of my little tips and tricks when setting up a new machine. Now, ordinarily, I would use migration assistant to go from either when I'm upgrading an operating system or when I'm changing a Mac. But since I've actually done that for quite a few of the past Mac upgrades that I've had, and so I've probably carried over quite a few of the different settings and apps and things like that, that I might not really be using that much anymore. So I thought it was probably worthwhile to actually do a completely fresh setup of this Mac. And then that also means that I can actually walk through some of the steps with all of you lovely people as well. And there is actually going to be quite a few videos in this series because there is at the end of the day, a lot of potential setting up to do depending on what you're going to be doing with your Mac. Now, I actually had a list of all of my sort of essential apps that I need on my Mac, but there's about 43 of them. There's exactly 43 of them that are absolutely essential to everything that I'm doing. So I'll probably need to break those down into smaller little chunks as well, like my top 10 productivity apps and all that sort of stuff. But that is for another video. Today, we're just focused on the Finder and then the next video I'm going to make is going to be all about the system preferences and the little sort of tweaks and adjustments that I make in there. So this is all basically stuff that anybody can do with their Mac without needing any special software or anything like that. And they're just little things really to make it look a little bit prettier, perhaps and hopefully run a little bit better and a little bit more logically, at least in my humble opinion. So let's start with the Finder and the first view that most people get of the Finder is actually the desktop because that is actually just the Finder. It's part of the Finder. So let's start with that, first of all, and I'm going to show you something now, which will shock you. Yes, I know. Look at that. Icons scattered over the desktop. It's terrible, isn't it? I don't know quite why that Apple made the default of view of the desktop where it had no snapping to a particular grid and people can just throw things on a mate and mess like that. I can't believe that that is the preferred method of organization. Not that you should be organizing files on your desktop in any case, but that's another story for another video. But anyway, I've just thrown some things randomly on the desktop and wherever they landed is where they stayed on the desktop. So I want to talk you through a few little steps that you can take to maybe clean this up to begin with, and then we'll go and actually look into the Finder itself and the sort of file manager. And I'll show you a few little things that I do in there to make things a little bit more manageable. Again, this is sort of tailored to my workflow. So do bear with me and you may want to do things differently. But hopefully by going through this process, I'll show you all the different options and you should be able to see how you can achieve what you want to achieve with it, whether it's the same way that I do it or not. So let's, first of all, organize these desktop icons. So if we right click on the desktop, then you can either create a new folder if you wanted to create a folder to put all of this a mess away in, then you could do that. And there you go. It's just created the folder wherever it happened to land. It's called it Untitled Folder, but if you press return on the folder, then you can just rename it. So I'm just going to call it folder because I'll be deleting it shortly anyway. But there we have a folder. And as you can see, I can move it round anywhere on the desktop and it will stay where it's put. So I want to add a bit of organization to this. You can change the desktop background in here if you want directly from the desktop. I'll be looking at how to do that in the system preferences as well. But here you just select any file. Now get info you can use on any file or folder. And it will tell you some information. Surprisingly enough, the get info function tells you some information. It'll tell you how many files that there are on it and the total file size. And then different features and things like that of the file. So that is something that you can do on any file or folder in the finder. It's just right click and go to get info. So if you want to find a file size, for example, like if I want to find the file size of this one, I can go to the get info on here. And it will tell me some information about it when it was created file size. This is actually one of my little overlays that I use for eCAM live. And there you go. You can tell when it was modified and so on and so forth. So that is the get info command. So this is all accessed again by just right clicking on the desktop. So use stacks. I'll come to that one in a minute. So let's have a look first at some of these sorting options, because these stacks is actually what I tend to use anyway. But it does all the sorting for you. But as I say, we'll come back to that. So the default, which I can't understand from Apple, sort by is non. There is no sorting whatsoever. You can have it so it snaps to grid. So in my mind, that's the next best thing. Where as you can see, as I move these round, they will sort of snap to some sort of grid pattern on the on the screen. And I'm just dragging these close to these areas. And as you can see, it's sort of pulling those in to a particular pattern. You can also do a cleanup or sorry, sort by if I select any of these ones down here. So we can either sort the files by name, by the type of file that they are, the kind of file, the date last opened and so on, or by size or tags. So if I do that, it will actually do a much better job of rearranging them. You see how now they're all listed down the side and just basically populating this grid, starting from the top right, going down. And then it would just keep filling up this grid from the top right towards the left. So that is how to sort them. And as I say, you can sort by name, sort by kind. So it's sorted by the different types of file, things like that there. There is some other view options. So let me come to that one next. So we'll leave this stack one, but that thing that I've just done there where we sorted by kind, you can also do that by looking in the view options. So let me go back to sorting them by name. You can see it's rearranged them all that way. The next one is you can change the size of the icons. So I tend to have things really small on my screen. A lot of people can't read what's on my screen when it's on there, because I do have ridiculously small text and things like that on there. The next thing you can do is you can change the grid spacing. So if you imagine the sort of imaginary grid that we've got on there, you can either have it really closely spaced or far apart. So you can see that that's changing the grid spacing now to be a really small grid. You can also change the size of the text. So if you want bigger text so that you can read it, hopefully there you can see that the text is bigger. I obviously go for the absolute smallest text. You can also have the labels for the files and folders. So at the moment, you can see that the label for the particular file is underneath. You can also change that to be at the right. So that's the way I have it, but you can have it underneath. And then you can also show item info. So that will show you, for example, there you can see that it's shown us some file information. This one has shown us for a folder, whether there are any items in it. That's no items in that one. So that is what that show item info is. Or in that case, it's shown us the size of the the image file. Next is we've got show icon preview. So as you can see, this is a file, which is my little overlay. And you can see what the image actually is in it. So if you've got larger thumbnails, then you can you can have that to be able to see. Or if you just want the little sort of PNG, you know, the file symbol or a movie, things like that, then you can have that one as well. But I personally just think it's always better to be able to get a little preview, even if you can't see it perfectly. It just gives you a little bit of an idea what it is. So I don't actually tend to have the info on because it's just a little bit too much for too much information for me. The icon size, yet you can make that bigger or smaller. It's up to you. But let me just come back to the stacks, which is this one up here. This is the other sort of view option. Now, this one will basically group all of your icons or your files, rather, that are on your desktop. It will group them all into little stacks based on whatever was a few different ways to arrange them, but based on the type of file that they are. So you can see how I've activated that now. And now I've got a little stack, which says images. I've got one that says PDF documents, one that says movies. And so if I click on that, it will expand to show me just the images down here. If I click on this one, it will show me just the PDFs underneath there. And this one will show me the movies. So that is actually the one that I use on my desktop. It keeps the desktop nice and clean. If I'm looking for a particular image or a particular document, then it will be in its little stacks. It just helps to keep it a little bit more organized. I do actually tend to only use the desktop on a sort of one or possibly two day, three day basis, where I'm working on a project and I've just got some files or folders that I'm particularly using quite actively at the time. And so I throw them onto the desktop, much like, believe it or not, an actual desktop. I have it as a temporary space where I'm doing whatever I'm doing and then I clear it all the way after and I use a little application to do all the clearing away called Hazel. But I'll do a whole other video about Hazel and how to set that up. And then I'll leave a link here when I actually get around to doing it. So that is basically the stacks. But I should point out that in the view right click again and use stacks. You can also change how to group them so you can change the stack so that at the moment I've got it grouping by kind of file, which makes sense to me, but you could also have it by group date last opened or date added date modified. So if you were keeping stuff on your desktop for several days and you wanted sort of the most recent day in a particular stack, then that would be the way that you can do it. And once again, you can get that from here as well. So this is in the get info. You can see I picked on it's not in get info. Yes, it's in show view options. Show view options. So here you can change the way these stacks are organized. So here I could change it by date added, for example. So all of these have been added today because I just literally threw them on there to give you this example. And so that's how that's how those have been sorted. So that is the I'm trying to do two things at once there. I was trying to change it back to type and I completely forgot how to speak. So that is the the sort of desktop and some of the set up things that I do on the on the desktop. We make that spacing a little bit smaller. There we go, just enough so I can see what the stacks are. So then the next thing I want to have a look at is in the actual finder itself. And here we are in the desktop view within the finder. And so what I thought I'd do is go through just some little view options, basically, that I tend to change on the finder, which I find are quite quite helpful. And perhaps some people don't necessarily all always have them on as a default. So let's just have a little look at those. So if we come up to the view menu in the top and click on that, there's a few things down here which I turn on. Well, first of all, in fact, let me step back a bit. I prefer and these this is all my personal preference. Your mileage may vary or you may prefer different ways of looking at things. But I tend to think in quite a sort of logical fashion with a folder structure and hierarchy and things like that. And think about things in terms of folder trees. There are a lot of new things built into, I say new, they've been around for a few years now. But like things like being able to sort things by tags or looking for recent items, things like that. So I know that there are different ways to manage files. And maybe I might be living a little bit in the past, but I do like these folder trees. So from the view options up at the top, here you've got, again, it's a bit like the desktop, really, a series of files and folders and things like that. And it's not necessarily easy to find what you want, especially if you've got multiple different levels of folders and if you've got lots of different types of files and things like that. So you could make it a little bit better by having a list. I think that's certainly an improvement. But I always do favor this one, which is basically it has a folder structure. So if, for example, let's just say I was to move some of these files into this folder, then you would be able to see here are the contents of the folder and you'd be able to go back up to the level and see the sort of base structure of them. So I always prefer this sort of view personally. If you're doing things with lots of images and things like that, then there's also the obviously the gallery view. And this can be quite good for just sort of browsing through different images and things like that. If you are looking through different images, then obviously this is a good a good browser view for that. But this is always my default view. So let's come back to some other view options which you may want to toggle on or off. And I've tend to just have these toggled on and then they never get switched off for me personally. One of them is the path bar. And this is coming back to wanting to know the sort of route directory that everything's in or the directory structure. And what that's done is that has put down this little. Structure at the bottom, which shows you the exact path that you've taken to get to whatever folder this is in. So this is in my odd drive, users folder, my home folder, desktop folder. And then there you go. That is the exact file root of that particular file. So I always find that that is useful just to get my head around exactly where I am in the system. And yeah, just easy to jump between things. Or if you want to hop back a couple of folders, then I can always just, for example, get back to the desktop by clicking there and so on. So it is just another little navigation tool. And I was just leave that on by default. It may be something that is useful to you. All of these are optional, obviously. The next one that I also have it on is similarly, it appears at the bottom and it is the status bar. So if I click on show status bar, you can see it's put this other thing at the bottom here. And this basically tells me how much how much space is available and how many items there are. So how many items there are in that particular folder. And if I come to this folder, then it will tell me basically some more information about the particular folder that I'm in. So now that I've selected that particular file, you can see that it says one of five selected and then again, the space. So I always just have that as another little help in terms of understanding where I am in the system, space available, all that sort of stuff. Next one is tab bar. Now you can use tabs in the finder. So if I was wanting to, for example, if I was in this folder, my desktop and I want to open this folder, I can right click on it and go open in new tab. So now I've basically got the desktop and then I've also got that folder so I can flick between them like that. So that's also good if you're sort of copying things from one to another. You can just drag it across. I'm sure most people know all of this. I'm just covering all of the bases. But if you've only got one tab open, then that tab bar doesn't appear at the top. And so but you can actually just have that so that that is always there. And again, it just just it does just tell you what's the the root folder or the folder that you're in, although that's displayed there as well. But it does just mean that when if you want to add another tab, you can click this little button over on the right hand side as well. So I can just click that and it will bring me into whatever your default folder is. So that's actually another good point to mention the default folder. So if you come into the preferences of Finder, so I'll come into here to preferences. And then there are a few different options that you can have a look at in here. So first of all, show these items on the desktop. So at the moment, any internal hard drives are not shown on there. But if you look up here where I've got this external hard drive here, that is showing up. And if I click on hard disks, then you'll see that it's now put the the main Mac hard disk up there as well. I don't tend to have that showing on there, although I do want any external disks showing up there if they happen to be connected CDs. Has anybody connected a CD player to their Mac or put one in their CD drive of late? I'm not sure, but it's still there for completeness. So if you've got an external CD drive that you put a CD in, then that would show up there. There may be some people that we need to explain what CDs are, I suppose. But anyway, so CDs, DVDs and iPods will show up there if ever they're connected. I haven't unchecked that. Do I think I'll ever need it? Probably not. You could also have connected servers on there. Again, although I do connect to some servers, sometimes I don't tend to need to have that accessible by the by the desktop. And I do incidentally click the of the external disks showing it's rare that I would plug a disk in and actually go up here to access it. But it does just show me sort of visually that it is still actually connected. So I don't go and pull it out without realizing that I haven't actually ejected the disk. And it is also a convenient way to just go up here and you can right click on a disk if the beach will stop swimming. There you go. And you can actually eject it from here so I can just click on eject. And then it will just eject that disk. So that's why I do leave that one showing on the on the hard drive as well. So a new tab or find a window will open in as it's set to here. Recent, but you could change that to anything else. I still haven't actually gone through on this computer and set up all of my folder structure and things like that. But you can just change that in here or you can just go to a specific file or sorry, a specific folder that you want. So I do have a specific root file folder that I will always have a new find a window open in. So that's where you would change that. Open folders in tabs instead of new windows. So yeah, the default always used to be that you'd click on a double click on a folder in the finder and it would open up a whole new window whereas here it just opens it up in a new tab. This is just the default set in, by the way, I've not changed anything in here. So that means that it will just basically open up in a completely new tab. Next is tags. So I've got to confess, although tags have been around for quite some time, I don't actually use tags a great deal. I tend to use naming conventions and have my own weird naming convention for things that helps me find things. So I don't tend to use tags so much, but you can just basically choose which ones are shown in the sidebar. So that's up to you. I don't tend to normally have those, but I've just left them in for now for completeness. So the next one is the sidebar and these are the default things that are going to appear in either your favorites down this side. You've got iCloud, you've got different locations or we've just looked at tags. And so you can choose what is going to appear in there. So recent, so recent files, airdrop applications, desktop documents and so on. These ones always used to be default, but they aren't any any longer. But if you wanted, you could toggle those ones on as well. Next is the iCloud drive. So that's this one's got its own space there you can see. And then locations. So a bit like on the desktop, it doesn't bother with the actual Mac, your own computer as a location, because you've obviously got that in the if the file manager itself or in the find it itself. But then any hard disks and things like that. And you can see that these are all currently ticked, but there's only my MacBook Pro sitting next to this computer. And then there's the network tab. But all of these others there, although they're all checked, they only actually appear there if you actually connect something. So that is the sidebar. And then next in the advanced tab. So this is something which I don't know is entirely necessary, but I always do it show or file name extensions. And this basically just puts on the file name extension. So if I come back to my little desktop view. Desktop folder, you can see how it actually shows me the the type of file that they are. And I am just so used to that now that I leave that on. But you may prefer not to have that. But I like to be able to see what kind of file it is. Show warning before changing an extension. Probably recommend that just so that you don't inadvertently change an extension from one thing to another by accident. If you're renaming a file. Show warning before removing something from iCloud Drive. I'll probably return that one off. But that is the these are just the defaults at the moment. Show warning before emptying the bin. It used to be called the trash. They've changed it to bin, not quite sure why. But there you go. It's not called the trash anymore. It's called the bin officially. And so this is show a warning before you empty it, which is possibly a good thing in case you accidentally delete things which you didn't mean to delete. Remove items from the bin after 30 days. So that's perhaps a good one so that you don't end up with a bin or trash that's got too too full over however many years if you've never actually emptied it. But again, that means that you won't ever be able to go and recover those items if you change your mind a little bit later. Next is keep folders on top in window when sorting by name. Now, this is something that I do actually do. So if I've got a series of files and folders in this particular window, I always like it to have all of the folders right at the top and then have all of the files sorted by name afterwards. But it just seems to my mind to make sense to have all of the folders at the very top sorted alphabetically and then all of the files sorted alphabetically afterwards so that you're not sort of rooting around in between folders when you're looking for a file and vice versa. So if you click this one in window when sorting by name. So there you go. It's now put that folder at the top. And if I had multiple folders with multiple different names, the folders would all come first and then the files would come afterwards. And then you can also do the same on the desktop as well. So here we've got some different files. And in fact, if I just put those other files back over there for a moment. So now we've got some different files and folders. And if I sort these don't use stacks just to give you an impression and then don't sort. So now I should if I come back here, I see what you're saying. I see what it's doing. It is it's moved these back there. So I do need to sort it by name. There we go. That's what I was trying to do. So now you can see that we've got files down here and we've got this one folder in the middle. So if I toggle this one on, then it's just going to basically do the same. The folder would be at the top. So that was the basically the settings. And when performing a search, so search this Mac, search the current folder or search the the previous search scope. So if you are doing a search in Mac, this is basically this little icon here. Then do you want it to search the current folder or the Mac? I tend to just have this search the Mac because I'm rarely searching in. I don't have folders that have got so many things in that I need to search in that way. So I just do leave that as the default. So nearly got this set up the way that I would have it set up. There is one last thing that I would do, which is a couple of different things with the actual bar at the top here. In fact, let me just double check if I've got everything in there. So there is a couple of other things in here. So show view options. So thank you, that is for the desktop. I'm getting myself all muddled up here. Do work, talk amongst yourselves. I think I've covered everything from there. I was getting confused with something else. There you go, easily done. So you can customize the toolbar in here, or you can also go and customize the toolbar in here instead in this menu. But you can just right click on and this is the same for any application. Usually you just right click in here and customize toolbar. Now, I'm all about keyboard shortcuts and I do tend to use them for most things or use the stream deck or whatever. But for some reason, I'm often moving around to find it with my mouse and I do find it handy to have the create a new folder. Icon up in the top to just be able to tap on that to create a new folder. Don't know why it's just one of those things that I use. But you've also got these other things that you can always add into the top up here. Or you can also add in things like the connect to a network, things like that. You just simply drag and drop them and click done. So that for me is now set up as I would use the folder. But hopefully they find it. Hopefully in doing that, you've seen a few of the little features that you can use when you're basically setting up your view and your sort of working environment, really. As I say, that's it for the finder. But there will be a few more videos all about setting up Max. And next one I'll do will be specifically about the system preferences. So just down here, lots of things to go through on here and get things tweaked the way the way that I like them. But hopefully in doing so, I'll show you how to get things the way that you like them as well. Speaking of liking, if you haven't already, don't forget to go and like the video and also subscribe to the channel if you haven't already. And if you've got any other things that I've missed or things that you do differently, then please do leave them in the comments. I always like hearing about these sorts of things. And it's as much a learning experience for me if people are doing things differently or pointing out things that I don't know about. I'm always learning new things every day. So do leave those comments and it will also help anybody else who is going through the process of setting up their Mac. So when I've added those other videos in, I'm going to create a whole playlist about setting up a new Mac and I'll leave a link to that over on the right hand side. Until then, check out some of these other videos and I'll catch you all later. Have a great day.