Arranging Files and Folders

In this video, we’re going to look at the different ways we can arrange our files and folders in a Finder window. When we’re doing this, what we’re doing is we’re grouping them by date or kind. Let’s see what I mean. Let’s go to my Mac. I’m looking at my ‘Documents’ folder here, and I’m looking at them in my ‘List’ view, this is how I prefer to look at my documents and folders.

Now, what I would like to do is I would like to group these different documents and folders by kind, maybe have all of my images together, or all of my movies together. To do that, what we do is we go to our ‘Arrange’ icon in the toolbar. When I select this, I have a number of different ways to arrange or group my items. You’re going to see one of my options is by kind. When I select kind here, what it’s going to do is to group all of my different files by kind. Let’s go ahead and select this and see what I mean. Now, we can see all of my folders are grouped, all of my documents are grouped, all of my images are grouped, and then we also have my movies and spreadsheets. This is how we arrange our files and folders.

We can also set them by when the last date they were modified. This is another good way of arranging them. Let’s go ahead and go to ‘Arrange’ here, and let’s go with ‘Date Modified.’ Now, we can see these are all the files that I worked on today. Let’s take a look at them by application. I go up to ‘Arrange’ again, go to ‘Application,’ and now we can see them by application. We have numbers here. Here are all my pages documents, and here are all my preview documents.

If you use tags, you may want to arrange them by tags. Let’s go ahead and select ‘Tags.’ Go up to ‘Arrange’ and ‘Tags.’ I have a few of my files here tagged. If we look, you’re going to see; I can now see my low priority documents and my work-in-process documents. Now, when we view them by tags, we will see duplicates. Why is that? Well, one file can have more than one tag on them. If we look, you’re going to see I have lighthouses here, which is work-in-process, and I also have lighthouses here, which is a low priority. It’s the same document; it just has both of those tags on there. That is why it’s showing up in both of these categories. If you no longer want to arrange them by tags, all you have to do is go back under ‘Arrange,’ and then go to ‘None.’

That’s how we can arrange our files and folders on the Mac.