Tips for finding your Downloads Folder

In this video, I’m going to show you how you can easily find and access any files that you’ve downloaded through Safari on the Mac. Let’s go to my Mac.

Let’s first open up Safari. I go down to my Dock here, and I have Safari. Now, if I were to download a file, I use Elementor on my website, so I want to download this to my computer so I can install it. When I download this, I click on download; it downloads it to my computer. Pretty simple. But where does it download it to?

Well, by default, it’s going to download it to a Downloads folder, a folder called Downloads. I’m going to hide Safari again. And if we go up to Go in the menu bar, you’re going to see you have a folder called Downloads. This is where it is going to download it.

So let’s go ahead and download that file and see how this all works. I go back over to Safari here. And then I go over to download. So now it is downloading that file. I want to access that file. Well, one way is by going up to Go in the menu bar again, I need to go to the Finder here, and when I’m in the Finder, I have Go. And then we go over to Downloads. Select it. It opens up the folder, and we have my download there. But that’s pretty cumbersome. I have to go to the Finder. I have to go to the menu bar. I click on downloads, and it opens up that window. There must be an easier way to find that file.

Well, you can easily find that file by going back over to Safari. So when I’m in Safari here, you’re going to see you have a little icon here. This is my downloads. When I click on this. I’m able to see all of my downloads. I want to view this in the Downloads folder; all I do is go over to the right, I click on the magnifying glass, which shows me that file. So that’s an easy way to find your downloads once you’ve downloaded from Safari, right through Safari. But there may be cases where this icon here is no longer showing, or the file is no longer listed here. Maybe you came back to it a couple of days later, and it’s no longer there.

Well, my favorite way of accessing my Downloads folder is by accessing it through the Dock. If we go over to the right side of my Dock, I’m going to hide this again, hide Safari; if we go over to the right side of my Dock, you’re going to see I have Downloads.

If you do not have this, let’s remove this here, I click and drag, and you’re going to see remove. If you do not have it in the Dock like I do not have it in my Dock anymore, what you’ll need to do is add it to your Dock. How do you do that? You go back up under Go, and then you go over to Downloads. It opens up that folder, and then all we have to do is take Downloads here, take this little icon, and drag it down into the Dock. Now, if you’re using an older version of Mac OS, I’m using Big Sur; this will be located in the center of your Finder window. Either way, all you have to do is take this little icon here and drag it down to the Dock. So I click and drag, I bring it down to my Dock. And I’ve added it to my Dock.

So now it’s in my Dock, but there are two other things that I like to do with the Downloads folder in the Dock. What we can do is we can set it to show our most recent file downloaded. So how do we do that? All we do now is go back over to this folder here, I hold down my control key, and when I click on it, I’m going to have a few Settings.

The first one is we want to make sure that it is sorted by Date Added. I select this, and now it is going to sort my files by the date added.

We have one other thing that we need to do. We go back down to my Downloads here. I hold down my control key on the keyboard – click, and what I like to do is make sure to set up as a Fan. I do not want to see all of my files; I want to access my most recent files. So now I select Fan here.

And now, when I click on this, watch what happens; it’s going to show a fan. And the most recent document that I’ve downloaded is going to be at the bottom here. So if I were to download another file, that file would be where this Elementor is. Elementor, that file would move up to the next level here. So as I add files, these are just going to move up.

If I want to see all of my downloads, then what I do is go up to the top. You’re going to see Open in Finder with a little arrow, I click on it, and now it opens up my Downloads folder. So that’s what I like to do. I want to add the Downloads folder or make sure that the Downloads folder is in my Dock. I believe it’s there by default, but then you also want to make sure that it sorts by date added, so it places all of your most recent downloads at the bottom here. And I like to have it in a fan view.

So that’s how you can easily access any files that you’ve downloaded from Safari on your Mac. When you download a file through Safari, what it does is download it into a folder called Downloads, and all of your downloads will be located there. This Downloads folder is just located on your Mac. You can access it by going to Go in the menu bar when you’re in the Finder. You can also access it by going to Safari. You’re going to find an icon in the toolbar where you can find all of your downloaded files—my favorite ways to make sure that the Downloads folder is in your Dock. Also, I like to sort it by date added and have it set as a fan. Then when you click on that folder in the Dock, your most recent downloaded file will show right above your Dock.

So that’s how we can easily find any files that we’ve downloaded on the Mac.