You probably already know that there are four different Finder views.
There's the Icon View, List View, Column View, and Coverflow View.
But the Icon View has some interesting features that aren't in any of the others that will
help add some color and interest to a folder, maybe one you have to look at everyday, and
you just don't want it to be boring.
So how do you access these?
Go to View and Show View Options or Command J.
This brings up the view options for whatever folder you're looking at.
So in this case I have Icon View for this folder and I have this set of options.
Note that if I switch to say List View the options changes drastically.
So you'll only see these options in Icon View.
Now the first one I'm going to show you is the icon size.
So if you want to make the icons larger or smaller you can drag this up or down.
This is useful if you have a ton of stuff and you want to be able to see lots of things
on the screen at once you can make it small.
If there's only a few items in there and you want the icons to be nice and big you can
make it very large.
64 is the default.
You can also change grid spacing.
So you can move the items further apart from each other which is nice.
Also you've got text size.
So if you really need to be able to see the file names clearly and it's too small you
can increase the size or if you want to have them even tinier to fit more characters you
can do that as well.
You can also change the label position.
We're used to seeing the labels at the bottom underneath the icons but you can actually
switch them to be on the right side.
This just effects this folder itself.
So it's nice just to be able to make a folder a little bit different.
Now another option you've got here is Show Item Info.
You can notice here that I've got things like the number of items in the folder.
So 11 items in this folder.
One item in this folder.
I've got the dimensions of photos.
So some nice info there.
If you don't want to have these icons that are especially made up of actual contents,
like the photo themselves, you can turn that off.
Now you get these default icons here for this folder.
You can also change the background.
So default is white, to have a white background like that.
But you can switch to color.
Click on this color chip here.
This brings up this little color wheel to you can go to one of the other types of color
selectors there and you can change the color for the entire background there.
So you can really make this folder standout.
This also helps too if maybe the contents are something that you really want to pop
out.
Like they are all images and you want them to pop out instead of having the white background
there.
You can also change it to a picture.
So you can drag and drop an image, I'm going to drag and drop a file from the Finder there,
and have a picture as the background for the folder.
Now you've got this Use as Defaults button here.
That will actually change these settings with the default setting for other folders.
So, for instance, now I can dig down to this Home folder here and notice the background
is the same.
Look in the samples folder here and you can see all my stuff is there.
So I can get out of that by switching things back and click Use as Defaults again.
Notice I set this one specifically so I have to actually change this one back manually.
But other ones won't be set to that default anymore.
So if you do like a different icon size or grid spacing or something like that or you
always want the label positions to be on the right you can have the Use as Default button
to change it for everything.
Now the desktop is actually just in Icon View of the desktop folder and thus you have similar
view options.
So I can do Command J for show view options and you can see I have a subset of those.
So I can actually change the icon size on the desktop.
I can change the grid spacing, the text size.
It acts just like an extra folder.
I can switch label positions, show item info, take away the previews, and even sort here
by one of these categories.
So I can set it to Snap to Grid under Sort By so now things will actually snap to a grid
if you like things to be very organized.
So you've got a subset of the Icon View options for the desktop as well.