Use meaningful
names
You’ve got 255 characters to play with
when naming things, so give documents,
images and everything else names that
make it clear what they are: ‘Karen
attacked by furious monkey’ is easier
to identify and find than ‘IMG1698.png’.Clear out your
downloads
When was the last time you got rid of
all the cruft in your downloads folder?
Ours is full of PDF documents, Calendar
invitations, app installers and other
rubbish that’s just sitting there taking
up much-needed space. Zap it! Zap it all!Stick it in the cloud
If you have an iCloud
subscription you can mirror Desktop
and Documents Folders, deleting local
copies to free up space. To do that,
≈-click and select Remove Download.
A little icon appears to show that it’s
now stored in the cloud.Sort the big stuff
Go to About This Mac > Storage
and select Manage to the right of your
main hard disk or SSD. This enables you
to see what’s taking up space on your
Mac. Click Documents > Large Files to
see the really big things and delete
unnecessary ones.Tag everything
Tags are brilliant things, and
Finder makes them simple: by creating
descriptive tags in Finder > Preferences
> Tags and using them to classify your
files, you’re making it easy to find
related files by selecting the
appropriate tag in the sidebar.Batch rename
Finder makes it easy to select
a group of files and rename them all at
the same time. You can add, replace or
reformat text and it can automatically
number the files too, which is
particularly handy for sequential
things such as photos or screenshots.1
4 5 6
2 3
macformat.com @macformat | MACFORMAT | 25Smart file management
Use these simple steps to go through your files and organise things effectively
87 timesaving tips FEATURE
Appearance tweaks in Finder
>Some of our favourite Finder
features change the way things
look. For example, you know
that if you drag the divider in
columns view it resizes the
column, but did you know
to hold down å to resize
everything equally or that youcan double-click on the divider
to make it as wide as the
longest item? We’ve also spent
many a happy hour changing
our folder icons. To do that,copy the image you want from
Preview by pressing ç+A and
ç+C, select the folder, press
ç+I to bring up the Get Info
and tap on its icon. Finally,press ç+V to paste in the
new image.
You can also organise
folder contents into groups by
≈-clicking and choosing Use
Groups. This re-orders files
by type: folders first, then
documents and other files.