Customize the Finder Window Sidebar

The Finder window’s sidebar rests along the left side of every Finder window. It provides you with one-click access to the areas of your Mac you use the most, but what you see doesn’t have to be all you get. You can customize the sidebar—adding, for instance, folders for your current project. In this chapter, we’ll look at how you can turn your sidebar into one of your favorite timesavers ①.

What the Sidebar Can Do

The sidebar is a convenient parking spot for aliases, or shortcuts, to folders, drives, and servers, as well as for tags, giving you easy access to these items, regardless of where they are stored.

Click any item in the sidebar to open it in that window.

The sidebar also makes the Open and Save dialogs more convenient when you’re navigating to a file to open it or saving a new one in a particular place.

It also makes it easy to move things in and out of folders. Just drag a file’s icon directly onto an item in the sidebar to file it there.

What’s in the Sidebar

By default, the Finder window’s sidebar includes the parts of your Mac that Apple guesses you’ll use the most ②.

Here’s an overview:

• Favorites: Under the Favorites header, you see AirDrop, All My Files, Applications, Desktop, Documents, Downloads, and possibly iCloud Drive.

• iCloud: If you’ve put your Desktop and Documents folder in iCloud (see Manage Your Storage), they’ll appear under an iCloud header, along with iCloud Drive.
• Devices: Here you may see various connected items, as well as Remote Disk.
• Shared: Under Shared, you see any connected servers as well as shared devices, like a Time Capsule.
• Tags: Finally, at the bottom—you might need to scroll down to see this—is a Tags header. (See Finder Tags and the Sidebar, ahead, for an explanation.)

Set Up Your Sidebar

In the Finder, choose Finder > Preferences > Sidebar ③. Here, you can go through the list of possibilities and pick and choose.

Be stingy with what you include—don’t waste the sidebar’s limited space. (Too many items and you’ll have to scroll to see them all.) For example, do you use the All My Files item? If the answer is no, uncheck it.

When you’re done, close the window.

You can also add or remove items from the sidebar without using Finder Preferences, which is more convenient when you just have a few tweaks.

Adding a Sidebar Item

• Select a file, folder, or app in the Finder and choose File > Add to Sidebar (or press Command-Control-T).
• If the item is a folder, you can also drag its icon into place in the sidebar’s Favorites section.
• If the item is an app, you can Command-drag its icon to the sidebar’s Favorites section.

Reorganizing Sidebar Items

• Drag an item up or down within its section of the list. (You can’t drag iCloud Drive, for instance, to the Shared section.)
• Drag a header up or down in the list. For example, if you use tags constantly, drag the Tags header to the top.

Removing a Sidebar Item

• Drag the item off the window until you see a remove icon and then release.
• Control-click an item and choose Remove from Sidebar in the contextual menu ④.

How to Use the Sidebar

Once you’ve set up your sidebar, you can do more with it than just get to your Downloads or Documents folders quickly. Here are two of my favorites ways to use it:

Add Temporary Project Files

One of the most convenient, and most overlooked, aspects of the sidebar is that you can update it to reflect what you’re currently working on.

Right now in my sidebar, there’s a Sierra folder (the shared, deeply-nested Dropbox folder where files for this book are stored); a Screenshots folder (the folder where my screenshot utility sends my original images); and a Sierra Images folder (the Dropbox folder where I organize processed images) ⑥.

With these in the sidebar, I can get to what I need with one click and easily save new files to the right place. When I’m finished with this book, I’ll drag the folders out of my sidebar and be ready for what’s next.

Add a Smart Folder

A smart folder automatically gathers files according to criteria you set—for instance, folders added yesterday or items with the Hot Project tag. The folder stays up to date, changing as the files on your Mac change.

Say, for example, you want any easy way to go straight to documents you’ve used in the last week. In the Finder, choose File > New Smart Folder. Click the plus button near the upper right and then set the pop-up menus that appear to read [Last modified date] is [within last] 7 [days].

To get more specific, you can click the plus button again and add another criterion, like [Kind] is [Document] ⑦.

When you finish, click Save. In the Save As dialog that appears, give your smart folder a name, like This Week, leave the Where pop-up menu set to Saved Searches, and make sure the Add to Sidebar checkbox is selected ⑧. Click Save.

Your smart folder appears in the sidebar’s Favorites section with a gear icon next to its name. Click it anytime to see your most recently modified files.

If you want to tinker with a smart folder’s search criteria later, Control-click it in the sidebar and choose Show Search Criteria.

Finder Tags and the Sidebar

The last section of the sidebar is Tags. Finder tags let you assign keywords and labels to files and folders on your Mac, in iCloud Drive, and even in some third-party file sharing services, like Dropbox. That means even if you prefer to litter your Desktop with files, a simple search can easily gather everything you need for a project.

Setting up Your Tags

Go to Finder > Preferences > Tags to view your tag options ⑨.

You can set up tags and indicate which tags will appear in the sidebar:

• Add a tag: Click the plus button.
• Reorder a tag: Drag it up or down in the list. If the tag is showing in the sidebar (see below in this list), the sidebar will reflect the new position.
• Rename a tag: Click its name, pause, and then click again. The name becomes editable and you can type in your replacement.
• Delete tags: Select one or more tags and then click the minus button.
• Change a tag’s color: Click the dot next to the tag’s name and choose a new color. You’re limited to the eight basic hues (including the “No Color” color), but more than one tag can share a color. If you choose a color, the tagged file will appear with a colored dot by its name in the Finder.
• Set which tags appear in the sidebar: Add a tag to the sidebar by selecting its checkbox at the right; uncheck the box to remove it.
• Put a tag in the contextual menu: Drag the tag to the box at the bottom of the Finder Preferences window. (To remove it, drag it off the box until you see a remove icon and then release.)

Tagging Your Files

• In the Finder by dragging: Drag a file (or a group of files) in the Finder and drop it on top of the appropriate tag in the Finder sidebar ⑩.

• When saving: The easiest way to tag a file is when you save it. Below the filename field, click in the Tags field to choose from a drop-down menu of all your tags, or type in a new tag (or existing tag) and press Return.
• When the file is open: In many apps, you can click the file’s name in the title bar to see a Tags field that works just like the one described in the previous bullet item.
• In the Finder with a click: Another way to tag an item in the Finder is to Control-click it to open a contextual menu and then select a tag from the list you see there.

Removing a Tag

Control-click a file in the Finder, and in the contextual menu that appears, select the one you want to remove in the list of tags ⑪.

Finding Tagged Files

You can locate tagged files using a variety of methods:

• From the sidebar: Click a tag in a Finder window sidebar to see all files associated with it. This works for a quick, single-tag search.
• Using Siri: Ask a question like “Find files tagged TagName.” (Replace TagName with the name of your tag.) In my testing, Siri wasn’t able to find files with more than one tag.
• Using Spotlight: Activate Spotlight (press Command-Space) and type tag: TagName in the search field to see all files associated with that tag ⑫. You can search for files with more than one tag simply by adding another to your query: tag: TagName1 tag: TagName2.

You can also find tagged files using the Finder’s search tool (press Command-F).

• Find files with one tag: In the search field, start typing the name of your tag. A drop-down menu appears with matches. Choose your tag ⑬.

• Perform a multi-tag search: In the search field, type tag:TagName and press Return. A token for that tag appears in the search field. Then, for your next tag, type tag:TagName and press Return. This creates an AND search. In other words, your search will only find files tagged with both tags.

Access the Sidebar in Open and Save Dialogs

One of the sidebar’s most convenient aspects is that you can access it (or at least, part of it) when you’re opening or saving files.

When you open a file in apps like Preview, TextEdit, or Pages by choosing File > Open, notice that the Finder sidebar appears to the left of the Open dialog ⑭. (Sometimes with an additional iCloud or Media header.)

When you save a file for the first time or choose File > Save As in an app, click the Where menu to see folders listed under your sidebar’s Favorites header. This makes it extra easy to save files to these locations.