What’s New in the Notes App

In this video, we’re going to look at what’s new with the Notes app with macOS Catalina. Apple added a new way to view your notes; gallery view. Let’s take a look at the gallery view in the Notes app.

Let’s go to my Mac. Let’s go and open up my Notes. In previous versions of Notes, or should I say earlier versions of macOS, when you viewed your Notes, the way you viewed them was in this list of views. I have my categories over here on the left. When I click on a category, I can see all of the notes in that category. When I click on a note, let’s go ahead and click on this New Note here. It has a photograph on it. I can see the photograph.

I want to take a look at this note here. Click on it; I can take a look at that note. We have a new way of viewing these notes here, this list of notes here in the middle. We can now view them in the gallery view. I prefer to use gallery view over top of this list view. Let’s see why.

To view them in a gallery view, what we do is, we click on these four squares here. When I click on them, you’re going to see it switches over to a gallery view. Now, why do I prefer it this way? It makes it easier to see what the note contains. I can see that this note here contains a coupon from Robert Denooyer. I can read that. I can see that this is a sketch. I can go and see what I’m talking about in the database here. I can read that text. I can also easily see that this one is shared. With a list view, you can also see that they’re shared, but we have the little icon in the upper right-hand corner that makes it easier to see. These notes here are locked. When I click on them, I’m going to have to enter a password.

To open up a note, let’s go ahead and open this note back up. All I do is just double-click on it, and now I can view that note. To go back, I click on the little arrow here, and now I’m back at all of my notes in gallery view. If you want to make the thumbnails larger, you can go up to View in the menu bar, and then you can go on Zoom In. Now it’s going to make the thumbnails larger. I go back up to View. I can Zoom In again. Or what I can do is I can go to View and Zoom Out.

That’s the new gallery view in the Notes app with macOS Catalina. What we’re able to do, in addition to viewing our notes as a list, we can now view them as a thumbnail in a gallery view. We can resize those thumbnails by going up to View in the menu bar—double-click on the note to open up that note.

That’s a look at what’s new with the Notes app gallery view in macOS Catalina.