Set which Applications Open at Login

In this video, we’re going to look at how we can automatically open up an app once we log into our computer. Maybe you use an app all the time, so you want that app to open up as soon as you log into your computer. Maybe it’s something like QuickBooks, or in my case, it’s ScreenFlow. Anytime I restart my computer, I log into my account; I’d like that app to open up. Let’s see how we can do this on the Mac. Let’s go to my Mac.

Now, as I mentioned in the introduction, I use ScreenFlow here. This is what I use to record my videos. What I would like to do is I would like to have this application open up as soon as I log into my account because I use it all the time. So I just want to have it open up once I log into my computer. We have a couple of different ways to do that.

The first way is to just click on it in the Dock. I just click and hold on it while it’s in the Dock, we go over to Options, and then you’re going to see Open at login. All I have to do is just select this, and now anytime I log into my Mac, ScreenFlow will open up.

If you no longer want it to open up, you just click and hold again, go over to Options. You’re going to see it as a checkmark, which means it is going to open up. I de-select it, and now if I were to restart my Mac and log back in, ScreenFlow would not open up anymore. So that’s one way of having your Mac open up an app at login. We do this through the Dock.

We can also do this through the System Preferences. When we do it through the System Preferences, we can see a list of all of the apps that will open up, and we can have the app automatically hide once we open it up. How do we do that? Well, we first need to go to our System Preferences. So I go up to the Apple menu, and then we go over to System Preferences. From here, what we need to do is go to Users & Groups. Under Users & Groups, we have all of the accounts on our Mac. In most cases, you’re just going to see one account, your account. You just click on it to select it, and then you go over to Login items. I select it, and now I can see all of the apps that will open up when I log into my computer.

So right now, I have just one app – Parallels Toolbox. Let’s go and add ScreenFlow again. I’m going to go to the Dock. We’re going to add it through the Dock. I click and hold on this; we go over to Options and then Open at login. When I do this, watch what happens. When I go back up to my Login items, we have ScreenFlow. So it automatically added it to my Login items. If I were to go to Things here, this is my to-do list; I like to have that open as well. I click and hold. I go to Options. I go to Open at login, and then we can see it added it to my login list.

Now from here, what I’m able to do is hide those applications once they open up. So let’s say I just wanted to have the application open, but I’d like to hide it. So it’s just in the background. I may not use it right away, so I want it open, but I do not want it to show. All I have to do is just select Hide, and now anytime I log in, things will open, but then the Mac will hide it in the background.

If you no longer want to have it open up at login, you can select it here, and then go down to the ‘-‘ and it’ll remove it. I can also add any application by clicking on the ‘+’ here, going to my applications, and then selecting the application.

We can have documents open up as well. So if I wanted a document to open up every time I opened up my Mac, I could just select a document here, and it’ll open up that document every time I log into my Mac.

So that’s how we can set an application to open up on the Mac once we log into it. We can do this through the Dock, which is the easiest way to do it, and then we can also do it through System Preferences. When we go through our System Preferences, we just go to Users & Groups, and then we select our account, go to Login items. We’re going to be able to see all of the different applications or all of the different items because we can use documents as well; we’re going to see all of the different items that open up when we log into our Mac. From there, we can set if we want to hide any of those once they open up, and then we can also remove them.

So that’s how we can set what opens up automatically when we log in to our Mac.