Hi, this is Gary with MacMost.com.
Today, let me show you some tips for using the List View in the Finder.
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So List View in the Finder is probably the view with the most functionality.
You can get to List View by either clicking here on this button which will change to List
View or to go into View, As List.
List View gives you not only the names of the files but also other information about
each one.
For instance here you can see the Date Modified, the Size, and the Kind of each file.
List View also allows you to easily sort the files in a variety of different ways.
Basically you can use the Column Title to sort them.
In this case they are already sorted by Name in ascending order.
You can see here this little mark, an arrow pointing up, tells you it's using this column
name and doing it in ascending order.
If I wanted to sort by Date Modified all I need to do is click the Date Modified Title
and you can see the arrow moves there.
Now they're sorted by Date Modified in ascending order.
You can always reverse the order of the sort by clicking again and you can see that arrow
now is pointing down.
Now we have the most recent files first.
The same thing here with Name.
We click that once and we're in alphabetical order starting with A. But if we click again
you can see now it reverses the order and goes from Z to A.
Now you can Resize any of these columns by clicking and dragging the line between the
titles.
You can see that the cursor changes there.
I can click and drag to the left or the right to resize the column.
Notice if you do that with columns that have dates in them the format of the date will
change.
So as I shrink this you can see it goes to a smaller format and when I enlarge it, it
goes to a larger format spelling out the whole month.
You could also double click on any of these little lines to right size the column.
In other words it will match the longest piece of text there.
So it was able to shrink this Name column because it there was excess space.
If I was to shrink this column too much you can see the names are shortened.
I could move the cursor over one and I could see the file name here.
But I could just double click and it will right size it again larger to fit the longest
name there.
Now you can add many more columns than just these four.
There are two ways to do that.
A really simple way is to Control click on any of these titles here.
Just hold the Control key down and click and you get this little list here.
You can see the checkmarks next to the columns that are there.
By default Name is always there as a column but I have these three additional columns
here.
I could add a new one, like let's add Date Created, and now you could see I have that
new column there.
I could Control click and remove Date Created just as easily.
You could also go to View, and Show View Options or just Command J. Here you'll see a list
of all of the different columns and you could check or uncheck each one.
Now you could also rearrange the columns.
If you want Size to be to the left of Date Modified just click and drag and you can move
that column around.
You can't put anything to the left of the Name column but you could move the rest of
the columns to be in any order you want.
Now when we look to the View options there with Command J we saw that there's also two
sizing options.
You can change the size of the text to make it larger or even go smaller.
You also have two choices in Icon size.
So you can make the icon a little bit bigger to make it easier to see some of the picture
icons there.
Now if you're sorting by size one of the things that you may notice is that folders don't
have size.
They just have two dashes.
But if you want to include Folders in that sort you need to enable Calculate All Sizes
here in the View options.
When you do that the Folder sizes will be shown as well.
Now it's pretty quick here if there's not too much in these folders.
But if the folders have lots of files in them it may take several seconds or even minutes
for all of the folder sizes to be filled in and complete.
Now you may also notice here under dates you get dates like yesterday.
If you would rather not see those you can turn off Use relative dates.
It actually switches showing dates for everything rather than using labels like Today or Yesterday.
Now if you want to dig down into Folders using List View there's really interesting functionality.
You have these little reveal triangles here to the left of any folder.
If you click on one it expands to show you the files in there.
You can view the files in this folder as well as all of the rest of the files at this level.
You can expand as many of these folders as you want.
Notice it does it with an animation.
You can see the expansion.
That could actually take a little while if you have a longer folder.
You can shorten that time by holding the Option key.
Watch what happens when I do it normally.
Watch what happens when I do it holding the Option key down.
Now you can also open folders using the keyboard.
So if I click and select this folder I can use the Up and Down arrows to navigate up
and down on the list.
But if I use the Right arrow it expands the folder.
The Left arrow will shrink it back into the folder.
The cool thing about that is you can do it with multiple folders.
So I can use the Command key here and click this folder.
Now I have two folders selected.
If I use the right arrow key both of those folders open up.
The left arrow both of those folders will close.
Now if I do Command A it selects everything.
If I do right arrow it will expand all of those folders.
You can see I still have just the folders selected that are at the top level.
Now notice there are some other folders here.
If I do Command A again now it selects everything that is visible.
The right arrow will expand any folders that are there.
I can use the left arrow and everything shrinks back.
So you can navigate around here with the keyboard.
So I can move up and down.
I can move right to go into a folder.
I can move down through there.
I can use Copy and Paste or Copy and Move to move a file.
So, for instance, I can go in here and say I want to move this file.
I'll do Command C to Copy.
Nothing happens right away.
I can go up here Left arrow to close that.
Go down to this folder.
Right arrow to open this.
If I do Command V it will paste a copy in here.
You can see here Command V, paste item.
But if I hold the Option key down you can see Option Command V is move item here.
So Option Command V and that item moves into that folder.
So you can navigate around and move files using just the keyboard.
You can also use Command Z to Undo a move like that.
Now you can also do that using the Mouse in spring loaded folders.
So if I open this folder up here and I grab a file like this and I move it over images
and I wait Images will open up.
I'll go down into it and drop that file into there.
You can see now it has taken me down into that folder.
If you want to get up out of it you can use Command Up arrow and you go back up a level.
You can use Grouping here instead of Sorting just everything alphabetically together.
So you can go to View, and Use Groups.
When I do that you can see View, Sort By changes to View, Group By.
I can change to group.
So I have Kind here but I can also do Date Last Opened.
Now you can see it puts them all in groups.
You can also Click here and change the grouping as well.
Another type of grouping is to have Folders on top all the time.
So in order to do that you have to set the grouping to None and you have to be sorted
by Name.
Then you can go into Finder Preferences and Keep Folders On Top in Windows when sorting
by Name.
All of the Folders will be at the top before all of the files.
Now in Column View you usually see a preview of the file that's selected on the right.
You can do that in List View as well although it's not on by default.
If you go to View and you use Show Preview you get that same Preview area here to the
right.
So you still have all the functionality here of List View but with the Preview area that
includes extra information about the file and also Finder Quick Actions.
I could see an image.
I could see PDF.
I could see text files.
All sorts of things.
Now here's a really bizarre trick.
You can Control click here I showed you to select different columns that could appear.
But there are special hidden columns you could bring up.
In order to do that you have to have the folder named a certain thing.
For this folder of images let's change the name, I'm just going to Return and change
the name.
Change it to Pictures.
That's a special name.
Now when I go into this folder here I see it in List View and if I Control click here
in addition to all the standard columns I could add Dimensions and Resolution.
You could see those appear here on the right.
Let's shrink down the Name column so we can see them all together.
You could see the Dimensions and Resolutions of these images.
You could even sort by them.
So that only works if the folder happens to have the exact name Pictures.
So if you're creating a project folder and you're putting a bunch of images into a folder
inside of that you might want to think about naming it Pictures just to use this functionality.
Or name it whatever you want, like I had it as Images, but simply change the name to Pictures
in order to see these extra columns.
Then when you go back into it, even though you've changed the name, you'll see Dimensions
and Resolution stay there as columns.
Now if you rename a folder Movies that's also a special name.
When I go into that if I Control click I see, in addition to the normal columns, Dimensions,
Duration, Title, and Codex.
So I can add these columns to folders that are named Movies.
Now one last thing I want to show you is that when you go to Open and Save dialogue boxes
inside of apps, in this case I'm in Pages here, and I'm going to open a new file.
By default you're going to see Column View.
But you can click here and go to List View and then you've got List View here including
the ability to Sort and Control click and add and remove columns inside of Open and
Save dialogues in apps on your Mac.
So even if you prefer to use Column View or Icon View as your main view it's worthwhile
to learn how to use List View because it has a lot of utility being able to see things
like dates, sizes, kinds of files, all here in the list and then easily sort by anyone
of those that helps you organize and work with your folders and files.
Also whenever you do a Find, so I'm going to search here for something, you're going
to get a List View as the result here.
So knowing how to control the columns and sorting is important.