Smart folders are also one of the ways how to organise things up. And it’s simple to work with them, i will show you how to create smart folders on your Mac.
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Create Smart Folders
Open Finder on a place where you want to perform a search. Then select File, New Smart Folder from the top bar menu.
Note that it doesn’t have any keyboard shortcut so you either need to go up here or you can create your own custom keyboard shortcut. I have a separate article about it, check it out if you need it.
Now I’m going to search for the word Test and select Name Matches test and also limit the search only in the Documents folder. And I can set another criteria like type of the file to be documents only.
Once the results appear there, you can press the Save button and it will allow you to save this as a Saved Search, also known as a Smart Folder.
I can name it as I wish, and save it where I want. But I also have the option to save it in it’s default folder under the library. This way I can’t access that Smart Folder itself but I can put it in the finder sidebar instead and not worry about the physical folder.
Let’s save it to the desktop because I want to work with this folder maybe put it in the dock or somewhere else in finder.
And it’s all done. Thats how simple it is to create a smart folder. It takes less than a minute.
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Advantages of Smart Folders
Now you might be asking what is the advantage of having the smart folder, if you can organise files yourself in normal folder. These Smart Folders creates another way for you to view files that have something in common.
The important thing to realize is that these results are updated automatically. Adding a new file or renaming a file that includes the word test in it. Will put it here in this folder where I can see it immediately.
The files aren’t actually here. This is just like a search. Each of the files is still in the original folder where they were located. This is just another way to view it. So if you delete this folder it doesn’t mean that it will delete the files in it.
Useful Smart Folders
Think of it like a music playlist, if you make a playlist, you would put songs in there. But it doesn’t remove the songs from the artist and album that the song is catalogued under. It just creates another way for you to view that song.
Good example where this is very useful is, when you work on different projects and you have some files which are needed for both of these projects. You can create a smart folder for these so they will be accessible from both projects without copying them. And if you change anything on that file it will be automatically updated everywhere. And you don’t need to duplicate it to take space.
When you creating the smart folder you can really go lot more complex with your search terms.
You can also hit the plus button while searching and filter by type like we did before, you can select last created or open date, select specific category, size, and so much more.
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