How to Create a Custom Smart Folder in Mac OS X

The Mac Finder is probably among the most used applications on your Mac. It’s the place where you store, navigate, and locate nearly all of the content (e.g., documents, images, and music files) on your hard drive.

The more items you add to your computer, the more challenging it is to locate files when you need them. This is why Apple came up with what are called Smart Folders, which basically consists of a collection of files based on a set of search criteria.

The biggest challenge in creating Smart Folders is figuring out what criteria you need for the type of search you want to do. The more familiar you become with the search options for Smart Folders, the easier it will be to create them.

Lets Create a Smart Folder

In a Finder window, go to File>New Smart Folder

Setting Up Smart Folder Rules

Click on the + button on the far right of the search box by the save button. Notice that the search will be based upon all the contents of your Mac.

1. The first pop-up menu consists of a set of attributes for the kinds of items you want to search for. These attributes include file name, type of file, date created, etc. For this tutorial, let’s use Name, which refers to the name of files.

2. Now click on the second pop-up menu to further refine the search by selecting “ends with”.

3. We’re going to search for Microsoft Word Files, so in the text field, type “docx” --without the quotation marks. If you have Word files in your computer they should automatcally start showing up in this Smart Folder. If you don’t have Word files, you can type, “rtf” for TextEdit files, or “pages” for Pages files.

The search criteria for this Smart Folder looks for and gathers Word documents into one folder, though the documents themselves may be saved in many different folders on your hard drive.

Go ahead and save the Smart Folder. In the next article in this series, I will show you how to add more than one criteria to a Smart Folder to further refine your search.

If you have any questions or comments please feel free to post them in the comment section below, or send me an email directly at jeff.trehern@gmail.com

Thanks for reading and have a wonderful day!