In this lesson, we will learn how to organize files and folders in Mac OS. There are best practices to how you organize your files on folders on your Mac. The first bad practice I see at times is having lots of files on folders on the desktop. And the reason why this is not a good practice is because the way the Mac OS graphical system works, having many icons on the desktop will require significant computer resources. You might not realize it with a few files and folders on the desktop but the more you add files and folders to the desktop, the slower your computer response time will be. Okay, now with that point out of the way, let's discuss the folder structure of a typical Mac OS computer. I'll now open a finder window then I'll go to the Go menu, then I'll choose computer. This will bring up the highest level in my folder structure. Here I can see my local hard drives, network items, as well as any external drives that I have connected at the moment. Currently I have two local hard drives, BSTemp and Macintosh HD, and I don't have anything in networks, meaning no connected servers or resources. I'll double click on my Macintosh HD hard disk and I see four folders, applications library, system and users. These are called top level folders. The Applications folder is where you have all your apps installed like Safari, text edit, calculator and so on. Next we have the library folder and that's where we have the shared libraries or files that are necessary for the Mac OS to function properly. Then there is the system folder which has system files that are also needed for the Mac OS to run properly. And finally, we have the users folder. This holds the different home folders for the different users on the computer. Right now, I have two user accounts, which are my demo account and my personal user account on this Mac machine. And inside the demo account folder, you'll find more files and folders. Now, some are files and folders that I created myself to organize my work, while others are provided for me by default. These default folders are the downloads folder where files are downloaded to by default. Then there's also movies, music and pictures. The Mac OS makes these default folders for us so we can store videos in the movies folder, songs in the music folder and pictures in the pictures folder. This is just a suggested folder structure and while you don't have to follow it, it just makes sense to organize your files that way. But the next question is where do you store regular files like PDFs or text edit files? For that, Mac OS has another default folder called documents. However, I don't see it in my folder structure and that's because I use iCloud. And if you look at the sidebar, I see iCloud and my iCloud drive. And right under it is my Documents folder. Typically, the documents folder is a local folder on my Mac but I have set up my iCloud account to keep the documents folder online instead of on my local computer. And here's where you could find the setting. I go to the Apple menu, then system settings, then Apple id, then iCloud, then iCloud Drive, which you see I have it turned on already. I click on options. And at the top, I have checked the desktop and documents folders. This is the option that makes these local folders not local anymore, but instead they are now under iCloud. And since I also see desktop, that's also another local folder but I now have it in the cloud as well. Now, someone might ask if you have the desktop and documents folder in the cloud, why not also the movies, music and picture folders? Why are they still on my local computer? The answer is because these are media folders and typically the file size will be large. So there will be a lag time to download these large files from iCloud down to your local computer whenever you want to use them or update them. And for that, we keep these files locally on our computer. Alright, so now that we have learned about the folder structure in Mac OS, let's learn about creating new folders and much more. I'll exit from this window for now. Then go to finder and open a new window. To create a new folder, we can either go to the file menu, then choose new folder or we can use the keyboard shortcut of Shift Command N. So let's click this option and now we have a new folder is created for me in this location. And another way to create a new folder is by right-clicking anywhere in the finder window. Then choose new folder. And here's the new folder and I'll name it anything for now. There are many actions that could be done on the folder and I'll discuss some of the most popular ones. I'll right-click on the folder and these menu options come up. From here, I will open this folder in a new tab. So now you see that the folder has opened up in its own new tab and it's currently empty since I didn't add any files yet. Let me go back to the other tab. I'll right click again on a folder. And the next option is the remove download. What this option is referring to is to remove this folder from the local machine, but still keep it in iCloud only. Actually, let me show you this option on a file instead. So this video file has a cloud icon with an arrow pointing down. This means that this file is currently in iCloud and if I want to work with this file I need to download it first from iCloud. If I right click on the file, I see the Download Now option or I can just click on the cloud icon to download it. Once it's done downloading, then now I know that I have a downloaded copy on my local computer and if I right click on it again, now I see the remove download option. Again, this means that I can remove this downloaded version but I still have the iCloud copy in the cloud. Okay, let me exit out of this file menu option and right-click on a folder once again. The next menu option is the move to trash option. And as the name applies, this will delete the folder. So I'll click it and now the folder has been deleted. If I realize I made a mistake, I can go to the edit menu and choose the undo option. And now the folder has been restored. I can also delete a file or folder by just dragging it to the trash in my dock. Then I'll now open my trash and here is the folder I just deleted. I now can right-click on it and choose put back. And we see the folder back again in it's rightful place. Let me right-click again on a folder and go to get info. This opens a window with all kinds of information about this item, like the size, where it's located in the folder structure and when it was created and so on. I'll right-click again on the folder. And next option is rename, which simply allows us to rename the folder. Next option is compressed, which simply zips up the folder into a smaller zip file so we can save on storage space and perhaps send it to someone. Next option is duplicate, which creates a copy of this folder in the same location. It's a much quicker option than to copy the folder then paste the folder. Next option is make alias, which creates a shortcut to this folder. You can think of it as a link or a pointer to this folder. Next option is quick look, which opens up a small window with similar but less information to what we saw in the get info window, like the name, the size, how many items are in the folder and the date it was last modified. All right, let me close this window now and I'll right-click again on the folder. And the next option is copy, which makes a copy in the clipboard so I can paste this folder elsewhere. And the last option I wanted to discuss is the share option which allows us to send this folder using multiple options. So in this lesson, you learned about how to organize our files and folders. Thanks for watching and stay tuned for the next lesson where I will show you how to move files and folders.
