Customizing the Sidebar

In this video, we’re going to look at how we can customize the sidebar in a Finder window. Let’s go to my Mac. Let’s go and open up a new Finder window. I’m going to go down to my Finder here, click on it, and have our new Finder window. Now, if we look over on the left side of this window, we have a sidebar. The sidebar is separated into different groups or categories. We have our favorites. These are our favorite folders. We have iCloud, I click on this, and I can see all the folders in iCloud.

I also have different locations. These are external hard drives, and then I have my favorite tags. Now what we can do is we can rearrange these. Let’s say I wanted to have iCloud up here at the top. Well, all I have to do is click and drag, and now iCloud is up here at the top. If I no longer want to see iCloud, I go over to the right and click on Hide, and now I can no longer see my iCloud folders. Click on show, and it shows again. We can also rearrange our folders within a category or group.

I seldom use airdrop, so I don’t want to have this up at the top. Let’s move this down to the bottom, I click and drag, and now it’s down at the bottom. We cannot move it outside of the group, so this is in my Favorites. If I tried to move it to My Locations, it would not let me move it to My Locations. Let’s go back over to My Documents. To add a folder, all we have to do is drag it into the sidebar area. We add it as a favorite. I wanted to add this folder here, my first folder as a favorite, I click and drag, and I place it where I want.

Let’s put it up at the top, and now I have my favorite folder there. To remove a folder, we click and drag it outside, you’re going to see we have an X there, and then it removes that folder. I can also use a secondary click, I’m going to use a two-finger tap, I get my secondary menu, and you’re going to see we have removed from the sidebar. This is also where I can go and add it to the doc if I want. When I add it to the doc, it does add it over to the right side here.

Now let’s say you wanted to get rid of a group altogether. Maybe you don’t use locations. You don’t have any external hard drives connected, so you don’t want to see those locations, or what you want to do is you want to change what tags are shown here. To do that, what we do is we go to our preferences, our finder preferences, so now what I’m going to do is I’m going to go up to the Finder here, and we’re going to go to preferences. A new window opens up.

Let’s go and move this to the center here, and then what we do is go over to the sidebar, these are all the default settings for the sidebar, so here we can see what folders are being shown. If I don’t use recents, all I have to do is deselect this, and now recent is no longer in my favorites. I want to show it again, I click on recent here, and now we have recents. I want to add movies, music, or pictures. I click on the appropriate folder. If you don’t want to use a service, such as locations, all we have to do is go and turn them off and turn them all off, and if we look, we no longer have locations.

I like to see my external drive, so I’m going to turn my external drives back on, and now we can see we have my locations back. Now, if you want to customize what tags are shown here, what you need to do is you need to go to tags, and then you’re going to see we have show these tags in the sidebar. We deselect the tags we no longer want to see in the sidebar. Then the last thing I want to show you is how we can hide the sidebar. To hide the sidebar, we go up under view, and then you’re going to see hide sidebar.

When I do this, I still have access to my toolbar at the top, but you do not have access to my sidebar. To show the sidebar again, we go up to view, and then we show sidebar.

That’s how we customize the sidebar in a Finder window on the Mac.