The Finder in OS X El Capitan has: icon view, list view, column view, and Cover Flow view. But it also gives you many ways to arrange files within those views. There are options such as Arrange By, Sort By, and Clean Up By in the Finder’s various menus. Unfortunately, it’s not obvious what each of these options means. The three sorting tools do have three distinct functions: Arrange By lets you organize files into groups. The Sort By option lets you choose how your files are sorted (by name, date, etc.).
- How To Sort By File Extension On Finder For Mac Mac
- How To Sort By File Extension On Finder For Mac Free
How to open a file with a different program on your Mac. The default setting for Mac OS is to not display a file's extension. For those who want to view the full filename, rather than having. Click the file name beneath the icon twice, more slowly than you would click for a double-click. This opens a dialog in which you can edit the file's name. Type over the current file extension and replace it with the new extension. For example, you might rename sample.jpg to sample.gif. Press 'Enter.' This opens a confirmation warning prompt. Feb 26, 2018 - Default folder and file sorting on Mac Finder. Preferences before, another great feature to enable is Show File Extensions in the Mac Finder,.
And Clean Up By lets you tidy up messy windows or your Desktop. But the three options aren’t always available in all Finder views. Sometimes you can combine them; sometimes you can’t. There are multiple ways of invoking them. In other words, they aren’t Apple’s smoothest bit of interface design. But here’s a rough guide to the way they work.
Icon View These organizing features are easiest to explain and demonstrate in Icon view; many of the features that work in Icon view also work in the other three. Even if you never use that view, switch over to it in Finder for a minute so you can follow along. To switch a Finder window to Icon view, choose View as Icons, or press Command-1. Start by Control-clicking (or right-clicking) in an open space in the Finder window. In the resulting contextual menu, you’ll see three options: Clean Up, Clean Up By, and Arrange By. (You’ll only see all these options if you haven’t set a Sort By option in the View Options palette; I’ll get to that later.) Let’s start with Arrange By.
From the Arrange By submenu, you can opt to arrange files and folders by Name, Kind, Application, Date Last Opened, Date Added, Date Modified, Date Created, Size, Tags, or None. Arranging by name simply sorts the files and folders in alphabetical order by name. None does just what it says. But if you select one of the other options, the Finder breaks its window into sections and organizes the files and folders into those sections.
The Arrange By menu. If you select Kind, for example, you get groups for different kinds of files: Folders, Images, Spreadsheets, Documents, and so on. Select Size, and your icons will divide into sections for size ranges—100MB to 10GB, 1MB to 100MB, and more. If you don’t have any files or folders that would fit into a given group, that section won’t appear at all. Within each group, files are displayed in a single horizontal row; if you have too many items in a group, you scroll horizontally and more will appear. Here’s what files look like in a Finder window were Arrange By Kind is selected.
Once you’ve organized files into groups with Arrange By, hold down the Option key and Control-click in the Finder window again. The Arrange By option in the contextual menu changes to Sort By. That lets you sort files within groups. So, for example, if you’ve arranged files by Kind, you can use Sort By to array them within each group by name.
The Sort By menu doesn’t offer all of the same options as Arrange By; you can’t sort by Application. If you arrange by None, you can still use Sort By to arrange the window as a whole.
The contextual menu isn’t the only way to invoke Arrange By and Sort By. You can also: select View Arrange By; click on the Arrange By button in the Finder toolbar (if it’s there); select Arrange By from the Action menu in that toolbar (again, if that button is visible); or open the View Options palette (which itself can be done in several ways, the easiest of which is pressing Command-J).
In many of those cases, the Option-key trick still works, changing Arrange By to Sort By. Some folders have special Arrange By and Sort By criteria. For example, in the Applications folder you can arrange apps by Application Category (Productivity, Games, Social Networking, etc.). These categories are inherited from the Mac App Store; if you have apps from some other source, they’ll all be lumped in Other. If you arrange icons by Name or None, you also get a Clean Up By option in the context menu (and elsewhere).
This sorts your icons by whatever criteria you wish (Name, Kind, Date Modified, Date Created, Size, or Label), but you can then move the icons around within the view; when you Arrange By, you can’t move the icons. Clean Up By is also a one-time action; if you add new files to that folder, their icons won’t follow your Clean Up By arrangement. If you choose Arrange By, new files you add to that folder will be automatically placed into the appropriate group. The simple Clean Up option just moves file icons into a grid, with no organization. This can be especially useful on your Desktop, if you save a lot of files there, and haven’t set an Arrange By option.
List, Column, and Cover Flow The View Options palette. As in Icon view, you can use Arrange By to sort files and folders into groups in List and Column views. But those groups are more compact and easier to use than they are in Icon view, especially when you’re viewing a lot of files. Files appear in vertical columns, not horizontal rows, so there’s no side-scrolling required. However, if a list or column extends below the bottom of the window, you can’t use the contextual menu to access Arrange By or Sort By (because there’s no empty screen space); you’ll have to use one of the (many) other options.
Arrange By Kind can be especially useful in List and Column views, because it displays folders at the top, making for easy navigation up and down a directory tree. As in Icon view, you can combine Arrange By and Sort By. In either of these views, you can Control-click on the column headers: that lets you choose which headers will display. By default, you get Name, Date Modified, Size, and Kind, but you can add others, or remove all but Name.
Because items in these views are presented in perfectly vertical lists, there is no Clean Up By option in either of them. Cover Flow view is a hybrid: at the top of a window you see files and their contents, and below is a List view. The options for this view are similar to those in List view: you can use Arrange By or Sort By the same ways. Putting it all together When you’ve organized files just the way you want them in a window in, say, Icon view, you can tell OS X to always use those options any other time you use that view. After you’ve set your options, open the View Options palette and click on Use as Defaults at the bottom.
(You can’t do this in column view.) The settings in your current window should then be applied in all windows opened in Icon view. (You can undo this by pressing the Option key in View Options: that changes Use as Defaults to Restore to Defaults.) However, in my testing, such defaults weren’t always applied; I know others have had the same experience. You can also choose a specific view for certain folders. To do this, open a folder, choose the view you want, then, in the View Options palette, check Always Open in View. Again, this works most of the time, but not always. And the settings you apply to one folder don’t carry over to others. As you can see, organizing files and folders in OS X can be confusing.
The best advice is to find a look you like and stick with it as much as possible; the more you try to customize each and every view, the more likely your changes will go awry. But if you do take the time to experiment, you may find these organizing features make finding and managing files easier than ever.
Editor’s note: This article originally appeared as a. It has been updated to address the Finder in OS X El Capitan.
Sorting files and folders in Finder is pretty straightforward in macOS, and has been for quite some time. It is quite simple to order a folder's contents by name, date added or modified, or even the kind of file it is, and most users will be familiar with these sorting options. While 'Kind' is a fairly useful option for dividing files up by their type, as well as bunching together folders at the top of the Finder window, it isn't quite as useful as it could be. For example, sorting the recent files option in Finder by Kind will certainly bunch together videos, spreadsheets, images, and other general categories, it also groups together files in a 'Documents' category that could be opened in OpenOffice, TextEdit, books, and even GarageBand projects under the category. A better option would be to sort by the type of application that opens each file, filtering the list of files in a more thorough way than 'Kind' is capable of performing. File Sorting by Application To sort folders containing lots of files in this way, first open Finder to show the folder you wish to reorganize.
How To Sort By File Extension On Finder For Mac Mac
Click the Arrangement button, which looks like two lines and six squares placed in rows, then select Application. Finder will rearrange the list to show the name of an application followed by files that can be opened by that particular software. If Finder is in the Icon view rather than List or Column, there may be too many items to fit into a row, with the rest viewable by clicking the Show All link in the top-right corner of the row. Clicking this will expand the row down to show its full contents, with it able to be reverted to a single row again by clicking Show Less in the same spot. Application Sorting If you want to categorize the apps in the Applications folder, there is no option to do this by sorting it all by Kind, but it can be sorted using another option.
How To Sort By File Extension On Finder For Mac Free
In this case, select the cog button then Show View Options, or alternately View in the menu bar followed by Show View Options or by using the Command+J keyboard shortcut. This will bring up a separate window used to change the viewing properties for this specific folder. The result of this extra refinement is that the groups will continue to be in their existing order, but with the apps in each group ordered by the last time they were accessed, with the most recent apps kept to the left. For Mac users with considerable App libraries, this particular sorting method is useful as it keeps the most-used apps in view towards the left, with older apps slowly shuffling to the right and eventually out of view. Further Notes This only scratches the surface of the variety of ways folders can be organized in macOS. As seen in Show View Options, it is easy to alter how a particular folder appears, down to the size of icons and the space between items.
The extra Sort By section of Show View Options can also be applied to other folders to further refine groupings. Sorting by name is useful if you know the filename, but if you don't know it by heart but have used it recently, the options in this box can certainly help you find what you need.