So I wanted to do a little bit
of a different video today and I wanted to share
with you some of my top macOS tips and tricks
that you may not have heard about.
So without any further ado,
let's get straight into it, starting with number one,
and that is a feature called Stacks.
Now, right now, as you can see,
my desktop is pretty filthy.
So if I right-click on my desktop
and I click Use Stacks, you can see
that's going to clean it up quite a bit.
And if I come over here and I click
on one of these Stacks, it's going to drop it down,
and I still have access to everything
on my desktop, but at least now it's much neater.
And moving on to the Finder window,
this is something I've spent a lot of time trying
to perfect recently.
Because I'm not sure about you guys,
but what I personally have been doing
up until recently is,
if I'm organizing files on my computer,
I generally have multiple Finder windows open, like this,
and I kind of have to find a file,
and then if I find it, I can drag it over and copy it,
and it just becomes a little bit of a mess.
So what I've discovered is that,
just like Safari, or your internet browser,
you can actually open up tabs inside the same Finder window.
So on your keyboard, hold down Command
and press the T key, and I'll do that twice,
and you can see this has actually opened
up several tabs, and this is really, really powerful.
Because say, for example, I'm in my Downloads folder,
and then I need to come into a folder
I have on the desktop, for example,
this LG Monitor video I've been doing,
I can very easily come into the Downloads folder,
copy this particular PDF, and then just paste it here,
and I'm just in the exact same Finder window
the entire time.
So instead of all of those random Finder windows,
I can just have these three open,
for example, this is my NAS.
So right now I have my Downloads folder,
the folder that I'm trying to organize,
and also my NAS folder, all open,
and it's just a lot cleaner and a lot easier
to see, visually.
Now, while we're still in the Finder window,
what I've also discovered recently,
and I'm not sure if this is an update
in macOS Monterey, which is the newest version
of macOS, but if you come up here,
and then you come to Show View Options,
you actually have the option to increase the icon size.
And as you can see there, that's going to increase
that little icon off to the left here,
and this is really handy for photos and videos
and things like that, because you don't have
to use the Icon view.
You can actually switch to List,
but still get a relatively good
and a decent-sized preview of the file.
So for example, if I come down here,
into my Wallpapers folder, and by the way,
guys, if you enjoy these particular wallpapers
that you see in my videos, I have them
all available for you.
I will link them down in the description below.
But getting back on topic,
if I come down into my Wallpaper Pack
and I open this particular one up,
if I, again, come here and go to Show View Options
and I change that to slightly bigger,
you can see now that I can actually get a better idea
of what each wallpaper is,
but it's still relatively compact in the List view.
And then you, of course, have access
to all of your metadata off to the side here, as well.
So let's close this down.
And another really helpful shortcut I've found
when navigating Finder is if you hold the Option key.
As you can see there, it's actually popped
up the folder path for this particular folder,
and I can now see exactly where I am,
and I can instantly switch back to the origin
of this particular folder.
So for example, again, I hold down the Option key.
I'm now in the Minimalism Wallpaper Pack.
If I want to go back to just the overall Wallpaper folder,
I just click on that and I'm back here.
Of course you can come up here
and just go back and forward,
but sometimes I just find it, especially the further
you get into a particular folder system,
it's just easier to hold down Option
and see exactly where you are.
Now, moving on to tip number five,
again, if we go more forwards into
this particular folder structure
and I hold down the Option key,
if I now hover my mouse down here
and I hold the Shift button,
and then I click on a particular folder,
I can instantly switch between
all of the folders in that particular directory.
If I come forward to the Minimalism Wallpaper Pack,
for example, and click that, I have access
to all of these folders and I can just click Designs,
and boom, that's going to take me straight
to that particular folder and everything inside it.
So again, that is holding down Option,
and then hovering your mouse over here,
holding down Shift, clicking on a particular folder,
and that just allows you to instantly switch between them.
Now, one other tip, while we're still
in the Finder window is, if you want to navigate
to a particular Finder path and you know that path,
if you click Shift, Command, and then G on your keyboard,
that's going to bring up a window
where you can actually just type in the folders
or the paths that you want to go to.
So for example, if I want to look in my NAS,
you can see this is actually going to give me a dropdown
of all of the folders inside my NAS.
And right now I'm navigating this
with just the arrow keys on my keyboard,
and if I press the Right Arrow key on Videos,
for example, it's going to bring me further across,
into this particular path.
And if I go down to, let's say for example,
Pending, press the Right Arrow key on the keyboard again,
it's going to bring me to the Pending folder.
And if I just hit the Return key,
it's going to bring me directly to that folder
with just a couple of taps of the keyboard.
So for tip number seven, this is actually an app,
and I'm just going to quickly open up an example here
so you can kind of see what I'm talking about.
Now, I'm sure you're probably familiar
with the Live Text feature that was introduced
in macOS Monterey.
Essentially it allows you to copy text
from photos or PDFs like this,
but it does have some limitations.
For example, you can't copy text
from protected PDFs, restricted websites, or even iBooks.
And also, if you're running an older Mac,
you might not be able to update macOS to Monterey
in the first place, and that is where the sponsor
of this video comes in.
It's an app called TextSniper.
You've probably seen it on this channel before,
but it allows you to pretty much copy text
from any video, image, PDF, or scan
with just a couple of clicks.
So to give you a better example
of some of the limitations of LiveText,
if I just copy this particular PDF document,
which has been scanned onto the computer,
you can see that LiveText will highlight the text,
but it doesn't get certain words,
like "such a" and "the least estimation".
There's a lot of different stuff
that it doesn't pick up,
and you'll also notice that it's copied
just everything on the page.
And if I now copy this by pressing Command
and C and I paste it in the Notes here,
it doesn't look very good at all.
There's a lot of line breaks, a lot of text missing.
It's a bit all over the place.
So let's see if we can solve that with TextSniper.
So I'm going to clear that out.
I'm going to come up here to TextSniper.
I'm going to make sure Keep Line Breaks
and the Additive Keyboard is selected.
Additive Keyboard essentially means
you can copy several things
and it's just going to keep adding it to the clipboard,
and I'll show you what I mean by that in a second.
So you can see the shortcut
to Capture Text is Shift, Command, and 2.
So I'm going to come down here,
hold Shift, Command, 2, I'm going to copy
this very first column,
and then I'm immediately going to press
Shift, Command, 2 again,
and I'm going to copy this second column,
and hopefully that picks that up
because the edge is kind of cut-off here.
And I'm going to come back into the Notes,
Command, V to paste, and as you can see,
that's not only copied the first column,
which is this section here,
it's also copied that second column.
Now this is super, super, super handy
if you are a student, for example.
So let's just come up here, and I'm going to clear out
my clipboard history, and I'm just going
to take a picture of this particular PowerPoint slide
in this lecture.
Now, this is something I used
to do as university all the time.
So now that we've taken a screenshot of this,
I'm going to move forward and we're going to capture
another slide here.
So for example, this one here.
So Shift, Command, 2.
I'm going to copy that, and then I'm going to come straight
over to my Notes, delete all of that, paste.
As you can see, it got the two different slides here,
and it's also kept the line breaks.
The Supply information here looks quite nice.
The formatting looks pretty decent,
and I only needed to paste this once.
So you can imagine, if this is containing a lot more text
and it's longer, for example,
it's like ten different slides,
you need a screenshot, and just instantly get into Notes,
TextSniper really, really does come in handy.
And I will leave a link to TextSniper down below.
Okay, so let's say, for example,
you have a image and you need to send
this image to someone via email
or the particular format that image was taken in is
not compatible with a certain program.
So let's say, for example, I have a scan here.
This is just a scan we were looking at before.
Right now it is a PNG.
If I right-click on this and I come here
to Quick Actions and I go Convert Image,
this is going to give me a number of different options.
So I can change the format from, say,
for example, HEIF to PNG or JPEG to PNG,
and I can also decrease the image size.
So right now it's relatively large,
about 850 kilobytes, which is almost one megabyte,
and I have a number of different options
to reduce this by.
So I can choose Small.
I can delete the metadata, if I like.
Then I can convert that.
And as you can see there, we can now email
this to someone and it's going to be a much smaller
and more compatible file size than the original,
and this is good for two reasons.
Number one, you don't need to take that extra step
of downloading an app or going to a website,
and number two, it's just more secure
because you don't have to upload
this particular image to some random compression website.
It's all done locally, on your computer.
Now, while we're talking about images
and sending things via email,
let's have a quick look at the preview,
because this is one thing not a lot of people know about,
which is really surprising.
So as you can see here,
I have downloaded a example PDF document,
and what can be really annoying,
especially if you've scanned something,
is that sometimes these particular pages here can be
out of order.
Now, I'm sure a lot of you guys know this,
but if you don't, this is going to blow your mind.
You can actually hold down on this particular page,
for example, and you can reorder the entire PDF.
So say, for example, if you notice that page 21
should actually be before page 19,
you can hold that, drag it, and just drop it
before page 19, and that's going
to completely reorder it.
And this going to save you a lot of time
and you won't have to rescan a document, for example,
if you screw up the order of scanning.
Now, this last tip is, again, a relatively simple one,
but I really don't see enough people doing it.
So let's say, for example, I have a couple
of folders, for example, this LG Monitor folder,
which I use to dump all of the screen recordings
and all of the footage for one of the videos
I uploaded on my channel.
What I can do is click this folder,
drag it, and drop it down in the Frequently Accessed section
of my menu bar, and what this means is,
for example, if I have a download that I want to add,
so for example, maybe this particular invoice,
I want to drag that, drop that into the LG Monitor folder,
I can just drop that in there,
and as you can see, if I open this up again,
that particular invoice is now in that folder,
and I didn't have to open up any kind of Finder windows
or do anything.
It was just one click and a drop
and that is in the appropriate folder,
nice, neat, and sorted.
Likewise, if I need to quickly access something
from this folder, I just click here
and that's all ready to go.
And if I don't need access to that folder anymore,
I could simply drag it off there
and release it onto the desktop to remove it,
and then, if I want to, let's say,
for example, I'm doing a different video,
I can replace that with another folder.
Or, for example, again, lots of customization here,
add all of these different folders
so they're instantly available for me,
and I don't have to keep them on the desktop
or in Documents, for example.
Anyway, guys, thanks for watching this video.
Hopefully you've found some of it interesting.
But apart from that, I will catch you in the next one.