From the course: macOS Sonoma Essential Training

Organize items on the desktop - macOS Tutorial

From the course: macOS Sonoma Essential Training

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Organize items on the desktop

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- [Instructor] Let's look at how you can store files directly on the desktop, and how you can get things cleaned up if you have too much stuff on the desktop. To understand this, I'll open Finder, and I want to go to the desktop folder, which is inside of your home folder. So you could navigate to your home folder and open it from there, but it's much easier to use the shortcuts on the sidebar on the left. If you do not see a shortcut for the desktop folder, you can go to the Finder menu, then to settings, then to the tab for the sidebar, and enable the shortcut for the desktop folder there. Now when I close this panel, in a Finder window, I have a shortcut that will take me straight to the contents of my desktop folder. And any files or folders that you see sitting on your desktop are actually stored in this folder. I just don't have anything there yet. So let's put something directly on the desktop. I'll go to my documents folder, where I have some files and folders I can work with, and I'm just going to drag something to the desktop. You can drag it from any location on your storage drive, drop it directly to the desktop, and it will be moved there. Or let me go to another folder where I have a lot of files. I want to select all of these files, so I'll click on the first one and hold the shift key and click on the last one. With all of these selected, instead of dragging them straight to the desktop, I'm going to drag them to the desktop folder itself, and I'll just use that shortcut on the left. So I'll drag them over to the desktop folder and they've been moved there. Now I see them here on the desktop itself, and if I go over to the contents of the desktop folder, I see the same things there. So you can store things on the desktop just like any other folder, but I think it's important that you don't store too much stuff on the desktop. If you do keep some files there, I want to make sure that you can keep them organized. So let's close this, and first, you can drag files and folders around manually and place them wherever you want on the desktop and get organized that way. And here's a nice shortcut, you can hold the mouse button down and drag diagonally to draw a box around multiple items. Now those are all selected and I can move them all together. So you can get things organized manually, but this can be really tedious. So instead, you have some quick options for organization. First, I want to make sure I click somewhere on the empty desktop just to make sure the desktop is active and also make sure that I don't have any individual files selected. Then I'll go to the view menu, and I want to talk about sort options and cleanup options. We'll start by going to sort by, and we'll choose one of these criteria, so I'll sort all of these by kind. So now all of my folders are together, all of my pictures are together, my PowerPoint files are together, and they're all much more clean on the desktop. From here, if you try to move something while sorting is enabled, you'll see they will just snap back to their designated place. Now, you can always go to the view menu, to the sort by option, and choose to sort by some other criteria, or if you just want to turn this off, you can choose none and everything goes back to where it was. Now let's look at that other option. We'll go back to the view menu and we'll look at cleanup by. And once again, you can choose a criteria. This time I'll choose to clean up by the file name, and it looks similar, but this is different. These items have all been moved to the new place as if I had dragged them manually, and from here, you can move items manually after they've been cleaned up, or you can go back to the view menu, back to cleanup by, and you can choose some other criteria to clean them up again. Now finally, one last option I want to look at is stacks. So we'll go to the view menu, and we'll just click use stacks. And now everything on the desktop is organized by file type with one icon representing each type of file. Now these are not folders and nothing has been moved on my storage drive, it's just a sorting tool. If I click on one of these stacks, I will see all of the files in that stack. And from here, I can work with these files normally, but when I click on the name of the stack again, it closes, and now I only see one icon representing the stack of those files. Now by default, stacks are grouped by file types, which I think makes the most sense, but we can go back to the view menu and now that stacks is turned on, we can go to group stacks by and we can choose some other criteria for the stack grouping. Or if you just want to turn stacks off, you can click where it says use stacks. That will turn it off and everything is back where it was. Stacks and sorting tools can make a big mess of files on the desktop much easier to browse. With that in mind, I still recommend you don't store a lot of stuff on the desktop. It's better to use other folders on your storage drive for better organization.

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