Desktop Stacks for Files on the Desktop

In this video, we’re going to look at Desktop Stacks and how it can help us keep our files organized on our desktop. This is one of my favorite new features in macOS Mojave. Let’s take a look at Desktop Stacks and macOS Mojave. Well, let’s go to My Mac. I’m looking at my desktop here, and we can see that we have a number of files on my desktop. Usually, what I will do is I will store temporary files, files that I’m using, on the desktop. Sometimes this can get pretty messy.

What I’ve done in the past is I’ve arranged them or kept them grouped by kind, so then all of my images would be grouped, all of my movies would be grouped, all of my PDFs would be grouped. Let’s see how I did this. Again, this is nothing new in macOS Mojave. I’m just showing you how I used to do it, and then we can compare how it works with Desktop Stacks.

To do this, what I would do is I would go up to View and the menu bar and then select Sort By. Right now, they are by name. Let’s go and sort them by kind. Now, what it’s going to do is it’s going to group all of my different types of files. Now, we can see we have my two movies grouped. We have two pictures grouped. We have my two PDFs group together.

If I were to go and add a couple of folders, let’s go ahead and add a folder. I’m going to go up to File here, and then we’re going to go to New Folder. I’m just going to leave it untitled. When I create a new folder, what do you think it’s going to do? It’s going to group with this folder. Now, let’s go and add another folder, so we can see how this works. I got up to File, New Folder, and now we can see it is grouped with that folder. It’s keeping all of my different file types together in a group. That helped out a little bit in keeping my files organized. If I needed to find a video, I would go to where all of my videos are grouped. If I need to find a PDF, I go where all of my PDFs are grouped.

With Desktop Stacks, we can take this a step further. What it’s going to do is it’s going to stack all of my different files of the same type on top of each other. It’s going to keep my desktop even less cluttered. Let’s see what I mean. I’m going to go and turn on Desktop Stacks. To do that, we go up under View and the menu bar, and then we go to Use Stacks. Now, watch what happens. If we look over to the right, I have a number of different files here. Now again, they’re all sorted together by the group, but they’re all still separate. Can you imagine how this would look if I had a lot of files on my desktop? Which happens sometimes. It would be a mess.

Now, watch what happens when I go and use stacks. It stacked all of my documents together. These are pages documents that stacked all of my PDFs together. It also stacked all of my images together, and then it stacked all of my movies together. It does not stack your folders together. Stacks only works with files, not folders, but we can still see it is a lot cleaner.

If I want to open up any one of these stacks, all I have to do is click on it. Now, let’s say I’m looking for a certain image. All I have to do is go over the images here. I click on it, and we can see it separated it. This stack is now open. Now, I have my tiger image, and then I also have my beach image. To close the stack, what we do is we click on it again, and it closes it.

Now, let’s take a look at my PDFs. I click on it. It opens that stack, and here are my PDFs. Here’s one, and here’s the other. Again, to close it, we click on it. What we can do is we can open up multiple stacks. I’m going to leave this PDF stack open. Then I’m also going to open up my movie stack. I click on it, and now, my movie stack is open. We can see that both of these stacks are open. Again to close them, I click on it. Let’s go ahead and close my movie stack, and let’s go and close my PDF stack.

Now, right now, this is grouping them or stacking them together by kind. What we can do is we can change how it is stacking these. To do that, we go back up under View, and then you’re going to see Group Stacks By. Right now, again, they’re stacked by kind. What I can do is I can also stack them by date as well as tags. If you use tags, you can stack them by tags.

Now, let’s stack them by date last opened. We can see my opened files yesterday, and then I can see the files that were opened in May, and then I can also see them that were opened in earlier. Now, we’re going click on May, and here are all the files that I opened in May. I prefer to have them grouped by kind. I’m going to go back up under View, and I’m going to group them by kind. Now they’re grouped by type.

That’s how we use Desktop Stacks in macOS Mojave.