How To Setup Smart Folders (Mac OS X)

Written by John Thompson on December 6, 2009 · Filed under How To, Software 

I spend most of my time using Mac OS X, and have a host of smart folders each doing different things. If you’ve never used smart folders before, they’re easy to set up and can serve many purposes by adhering to certain criteria set to match what you want to be contained in your folder.

One of the smart folders I have set up contains all the movie files created in the past 7 days, which I use to find my recent movie downloads without having to sort through my entire Downloads folder.

Smart folders can search for a ridiculous amount of criteria, including authors of a document, email addresses associated with the item and more basic things such as file type.

To set up a new smart folder, make sure that you’re on some form of a Finder window (your desktop or a folder for example) and select “File” then “New Smart Folder” on the menu bar.

This will open a new blank folder where you can declare the criteria for your folder. To do this, select the round “+” button located underneath the search bar in the folder. From here, you can choose whatever you want the folder to contain – for this example I’ll choose “Kind” as “Document” and “Last opened date within 1 day”, so that I can quickly get to a recent document I’ve been working on.

When you’re happy with your folder, hit save and choose a location. By default, the folder will also be added to your sidebar for quick access. Happy smart folder-ing!