Using the Finder

By Francine Schwieder

There are four basic ways to view the contents of a Finder window: Icon, List, Columns and Cover Flow. They can be accessed from the Toolbar (illustrated at left), the Finder's View menu, or changed with a keyboard shortcut. Each has advantages, depending on what you are doing and where you are. Many people, including me, prefer to have their home folder in List view. You can burrow down as far as you need by clicking the disclosure triangles in front of each folder. Of course if you have a lot of files and folders, the window size keeps increasing in height and you'll have to do some scrolling, not to mention closing items you don't need any more. Column view can be very handy under those circumstances, since it expands sideways, where there is more screen real estate, not to mention having a nice large icon for any file you are looking for. Below is an example, where I get to a file and still have plenty of room without scrolling, while doing the same thing in List view quickly runs out of room on the screen and I have to start scrolling downwards. Also if you then need to go somewhere else, you just click back to where you want, for instance I can immediately go to my Pictures folder and start navigating thru its folders, and don't have to close a thing to keep the amount of space under control and avoid confusion.

Column View

Icon View

Cover Flow

Shown above is the Finder's View menu, where there are various and sundry things you can access to customize Finder windows. What we are interested in at the moment is the last item: Show View Options, to customize the window contents. Also above is an example of a window in Icon view, with the options you get with this view. I have checked the box to always open this particular window in Icon view, the setting of the slider in the options window will determine the default size of the icons (once the window is open I can change the icon size with the slider in the actual window). I've minimized the grid spacing, to have the icons as close together as possible. You can change the size of the text displaying the file name, check the box to show the item information (in this case, that's the pixel dimensions), and the one to show an icon preview. I have chosen to keep this particular folder arranged by date modified (the newest will be at the top), and to have a white background. If I want ALL icon view windows to have these settings I would then click the button at the bottom to use these as the defaults.

At the left is the set of options you get for List view. You can choose which columns you want to have, and can then arrange the window by clicking on the column heading, click on it again to reverse the sort order. You can choose the icon size and the text size and can have icon previews drawn, although with small icons that's pretty pointless. I use relative dates (that's where it says Today or Yesterday, rather than the exact date). Calculate all sizes can be useful, but it takes Finder an amazingly long time to do that, so unless you need it leave it unchecked. Again, you can choose to always open a particular folder in list view, and you can set your choices as the defaults.

If you are upgrading your Mac to Leopard or Snow Leopard, you may find the business about always open in the view, and use as defaults a bit strange. The old Finder behavior has been changed by Apple in response to a chorus of complaints about not being able to set a default behavior for all windows. Personally, I find the new method really annoying, and in fact you still can't really set all windows to a default behavior. It used to be a window stayed how you left it--not any more! If you don't check that box the next time you open the folder it will open in whatever view the last opened folder had. And the use as defaults won't clear folders that had some other view set for them, it will only apply to new folders that are opened in that particular view. I find the new way to be more of a pain than a help.

As mentioned you can arrange files in List view by clicking the column headers, and select arrange by whatever you wish in the View Options pane for Icon view. The short-coming to using this option is that it doesn't keep the files in this order--if you resize the window things get lost or you get wasted space, and adding a file can result in it turning up in an odd place. The way to really keep icons arranged is to hold down the Option key when you go to the View menu item. The Arrange by fly-out changes to Keep Arranged by, and when you add a file it will go to its proper place in your chosen order. New in Leopard and Snow Leopard is the choice to arrange items in Column view in something other than alphabetical order by name. You may find this useful on occasion. Remember to change it back to name or you may not be able to find things later! The choice is global for columns and stays until changed.

A word about those gorgeous 512x512 icons--they are drawn by the Finder for all sorts of things, provided the file doesn't have a custom thumbnail icon already attached to it. If it does, the Finder simply displays the custom thumbnail. If you have been using Photoshop or Elements it is very likely that your image files do have such a custom icon, and those icons are a maximum of 128x128 pixels. Displaying them at a larger size will make them look pixelated and rather ugly. The only solution, if you want to see things clearly in larger sizes, is to tell Photoshop to stop creating custom thumbnails, and then remove the ones you already have. You can remove custom thumbnails by selecting a batch of files, bring up the Inspector using Command-Option-i, select the little batch icon at the top left, and press the Delete key.There is an advantage to having custom thumbnails--the Finder will display them instantly, while it may take it awhile to draw icons itself, especially if you have a large number of image files in a folder.