How to Customize Your Mac Desktop

There are many ways to customize how files and folders appear on your desktop. You can manually arrange them, or have them sorted automatically. You can change the size of the icons, the text, and the grid spacing. A new feature in macOS Mojave is to have similar files organized into stacks. You can also select what other icons, such as hard drives, appear on the Desktop.


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Video Transcript: Hi, this is Gary with MacMost.com. On this episode let me show you how you can customize your Mac Desktop.
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So the Desktop is a handy place for you to temporarily store files until you put them somewhere else or to put files in folders that you access all the time. There are many different ways you can customize how these files and folders appear on your Desktop.
So here I have a Desktop with a bunch of files and folders on it and the main tool for customizing how this all looks is to bring up the view options. First you want to make sure you have the Desktop selected. Click somewhere on the background then go to View, Show View Options or you can see the keyboard shortcut is simply Command J. This brings up this set of controls here. So the first option we'll look at Sort By. You can see I have it set to None. This means I can put these files and folders anywhere I want. But if I'd rather have them automatically organized I can choose Sort By and choose one of these options.
For instance Name will sort them alphabetically with the first one being in the upper right hand corner. I can also do by Kind and then it will put folders here and you see there's images. It does it alphabetically within each Kind. I can do Date List Opened, Date Added, Date Modified, Date Created. I can do it by size. I can do it by any tags I've assigned to them. So I get to choose these options and as I do things like change the name or add a new file everything automatically reorders itself to fit this Sort By option.
So what about Snap to Grid? When I select that it's just like having it set to None except that as I drag these around they will fit into a grid location. So the grid is kind of spaced out here and I can change the grid spacing using this slider here. You can see it brings it all in. I can also change the icon size which will also adjust the grid size there as well. So just because you set it to Snap to Grid it doesn't mean they all automatically move onto the grid. Instead they will move to a grid location where there's a blank spot the next time you drag that icon.
If you want them to snap to the grid whether you have it set to None or Snap to Grid you can go to View and then use CleanUp or Cleanup By. Cleanup will just move everything so that it snaps to the grid to its closest location. If you do CleanUp By and say by Name then it sorts it alphabetically. Now these are still set to sort by None but everything has been manually moved. So as I add something new it is not going to re-sort. You have to do it each time you want that to happen.
Now another option here, and something that's new to Mojave, is Stack By. When you set that to something other than None it will actually create stacks. For instance the first stack here you see is Documents. If I click that it expands Documents. I click it again and it shrinks it. You can see some of these only have one item so they don't go into a stack. There's no stack for Presentations or Spreadsheets but there is one for images and you can expand it and shrink it again. It's a way to keep your Desktop kind of cleaner. Instead of having fifty files on your Desktop maybe you only see ten different icons.
You can choose from a few different stacking options including By Date, for instance. I can do say Date Modified and I get a stack of the previous 30 days, a stack for March, and a stack for different years. You can also use Sort By when you use stacks. So they can be used in conjunction with each other.
The Desktop remembers any manual sorting you do. So if you have things set to None here and I move these around and reposition all these files, if I then change the sort to sort by Name you can see it snaps to Name. But if I go to None it remembers the positions of everything. So it's kind of like two modes that you can switch to. A manually arranged mode and a sorted mode.
Now in addition to changing the grid spacing and icon size you can also change the text size. So I can make the text really big and easy to read or maybe make it tiny to give myself some more space. I can also change the label position. So instead of it always being on the bottom I can have it appear to the right which also can be easier to read. Then you can check Show Item Info and you'll get extra bits of information like the file size, pixel dimensions, and length. There's also Show Icon Preview which if you turn it Off you get the app default icons instead of the little preview icons. A lot of times this can be visually a little more appealing and sometimes easier to figure out what's what.
Now in addition to Show View Options you also have a few options under Preferences. If you go to Finder, Preferences, and then General you have a bunch of options for what appears on the Desktop. You may already have a few of these checked. For instance Hard disks will show your main hard drive there and any other internal disks. External disks will show your external ones and then you can add things like CD's and DVD's and also any connected servers.
One other option that you've got is under Advanced there's Keep Folders on Top. So if I were to go to View Options now and then I were to change the Sort By to say Name, notice that the folders appear alphabetically with everything else. But if I check off On Desktop the folders appear first. It's easy to switch between a lot of these options. It's worth taking the time to try some of them out to see what might work for you best.
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