The following are a list of the favorite ways I work within the Finder. A few tips are borrowed from Keir Thomas’s Mac Kung Fu: Over 300 Tips, Tricks, Hints, and Hacks for OS X Lion.

Bookmark Files In Safari

Websites and pages are not the only items that can be bookmarked in Safari or other web browsers. You can bookmark files located in your Finder. You simply select a file and drag it to your browser. It will open and be linked to where you have it located in the Finder. You can actually make a folder of linked files that you might want to open up in Safari.

When you delete or move the file from its location, the link of course will be broken.

Put Files & Folders In The Toolbar

You can drag files, folders, and applications to the toolbar of any Finder window so that it can be quickly accessed and opened. When you drag them, a little green button with a + sign in the middle will appear, which lets you know you can drop it in the toolbar.

Folders In The Sidebar

Similarly, you can also drag any folder into the sidebar of any window for quick access.

Quickly Rename Files

When you want to rename any file on the desktop or in the Finder, you can simply select it and hit the return key. The word, the existing name, such as “Untitled” will be selected, and you can start typing and rename the file.

Files In A New Folder

In Mac OS X Lion, you can now quickly put files in a new folder, anywhere in the Finder, by first selecting them, then right- or Control-click, and selecting “New Folder with Selection.”

Lock Files

If you have a file that you want to make sure never gets changed or deleted, simply lock it. To do this, select the file, and press Command+I. In the Info window click the Locked box.

Delete Folders From Time Machine

If you use Time Machine, an OS X feature that maintains incremental backups of the contents of your hard drive, you can go into Time Machine and select to have backups of a selected file or folder deleted.

Simply right- or Control-click on the file or folder when inside Time Machine, and select “Delete All Backups…”

An Instant Link To Public Dropbox

If you’re a Dropbox user, you will know that you can drop a file in the Public folder of your account, right- or Control-click on it and have Dropbox create a URL link to that file. Pretty easy, but with a little application called Bloodrop you can set it up so that when you drop a file onto the application, it will automatically add the file to your Public Dropbox folder and  create a link which will be posted to your Mac’s clipboard.

Be sure to read the instructions about where to find your Dropbox user ID in order to set up Bloodrop.

Create A New Folder

You can create a new folder anywhere in the Finder–Desktop, open Window, File Open dialog box–by typing Shift+Command+ N.

ZIP Lock Files

Got a lot of files you need to email or post for download, such as in Dropbox? The best way to do so is to select them,  right- or Control-click, and select Compress…Items.

This will create a Zip file that most computers should be able to decompress and open.

For other ideas on files and folders, start with these articles:

• How do I change the folder icon images on Mac OS X Lion?
• How to Hide Folders Using 7 Free Apps
• Using Automator to Batch Rename Files and Folder
• How To Use Automator To Batch Rename Images on Mac

Let us know what you think of these tips. Do you have any of your own to share?

However, we’ve been gifted with a Linux-native program that offers a simplified set of features that is, in my opinion, easier to use and more visually appealing. Even more so, it usually comes with distributions that offer GNOME as the desktop environment. What is it and what exactly does it do?

About Baobab

Baobab is often masked in distributions by the name ‘Disk Usage Analyzer” rather than Baobab, but once you open the program and click on “About“, the name will suddenly appear. The name is based off the Baobab (tree), which is apparently the first kind of tree the developers thought of when making the program because of the tree’s unique way in which its bigger branches go off into smaller and smaller branches.

Overall, the program is lightweight, is easy to use, and offers some interesting visuals.

Installation (If Necessary)

Like mentioned above, if you’re running GNOME then Baobab should already be installed. You can launch it via the terminal or Alt+F2 by typing in “baobab“, or by finding “Disk Usage Analyzer” in the menus. In case it’s not installed, there are a number of ways to install it. It isn’t likely that Baobab is in its own package, but check with your distribution first.

For example, in Ubuntu, you can install gnome-utils via Synaptic, the Ubuntu Software Center, or by the command sudo apt-get install gnome-utils.

User Interface

Buttons

Once you launch the program, you’ll see how easy it is to use. At the top, you’ll see various buttons of what you can scan. This includes your home folder (recommended), the filesystem, a custom folder, or a remote location. There is also a stop button in case a scan is taking longer than you’d like and a refresh button to start a new scan for any changes.

Folder List

On the left side, you’ll see a list of all folders scanned and some information about them, such as the percentage of space the folder uses out of the entire scanned area, the actual size, and how many items are inside that specific folder. There are also arrows to the side of each folder so you can go inside those folders and see information about anything that is inside.

Colorful Graphs

On the right side, you’ll see a visual representation of the information shown on the left side. On the graph you can hover over certain sections and see more information about what it is representing. There is a Rings Chart and a Treemap Chart, and I recommend you look at both to see which one you prefer. One doesn’t give any more information than the other, but organizes the information a bit differently.

Preferences

Finally, there aren’t many things to configure at all, considering it’s supposed to be simple to use. The only things you can configure under “Preferences” are any other optional locations whenever you choose to click on the Filesystem button.

Conclusion

Baobab is indeed very simple and gets you results that you can understand quickly.  I find the graphical charts to be very helpful and keeps it from being boring to being useful. I like to use Baobab occasionally to see if there is an excess of space being used in any of the folders in my home folder, and sometimes I use it simply to see the interesting rings it generates. Either way, it’s a good tool that could tell you some things about the files you’re storing that you didn’t know before.

Do you think Baobab is useful? What other features would you like to see added in the future? Let us know in the comments!

Image Credit: Shutterstock

Scanning through each sub-folder would take forever, and you could also skip over something that may be important to you. For cases like these, you need the right tool for the job. Thankfully, such a tool exists, and it packs some amazing features that will even make it fun to look through all those folders.

About Better Directory Analyzer

Better Directory Analyzer, which I will from now on call BDA, is a simple freeware program that scans through the contents of any selected folder and spits out more information about it than you thought was possible. All scanned files can be sorted in a handful of different ways, which helps you quickly find certain files that you may be looking for. So how is this helpful compared to Windows Search?

Although Windows XP‘s version of Windows Search actually packed more of a punch, Windows 7‘s version only lets you search by filename, file size, and date modified (without using hidden operators). Windows 7 users can find benefit the most by using BDA as there are many different parameters to search and select files.

Installation and Launch

To install, you’ll need to head over to this page and click on the download link. At the time of this article, there is only a version 1.0, which is fine. Once downloaded, double click on the file to start the installer. Go through all the steps, and you’re done. You should now have a nice shortcut for BDA on your desktop. When you first start, you’ll land in the Files tab. Here is where you can choose the folder you wish to scan for its contents.

Either drag and drop a folder into the empty box in the middle, or click on the “Select folder” button on the bottom and then choose the desired folder. It will then take a couple seconds (more if the folder is large) to scan for its contents, and when it completes you should see all the found files listed in the box in the middle.

Features

Great, you scanned for the files, but now what? Here is where the fun really begins. In the Files tab, you can also choose the minimum and maximum sizes for the files you would like to find, as well as a range for the date modified. If you move over to the File Types tab, you’ll find a list of all the different file types found in your selected folder.

A great feature of BDA is that it can visualize many of its results in pie charts, so you can adjust the number of specific file types that should be shown, choose whether it should count the number of files or the amount of space that each file type takes up, and then hit Visualize.

Under the Duplicate Files tab, you can easily spot duplicate files and delete extras where they are not needed. This tab is amazing if you know there are some duplicates and want to regain some wasted hard drive space. Here’s a simple tip: if you know that there are some files that are duplicated in two different folders, you can create a new folder and drag the other two into the new one. Then you can scan the new umbrella folder to include the files of the two other folders.

The Hidden Files tab is virtually the same as the tab for Duplicate Files, except that it shows hidden files. You can also select these and delete them as you wish. Finally, there is a Largest Files tab, where you can choose to view any number of the top files in terms of size. This helps find some clunkers that could be moved or deleted as needed. This tab also has a Visualize button.

The last tab in the program (besides Help) is the HTML Report tab. With this tab you can create a report (in HTML, I assume) that contains any of the selected bits of information over the scanned content of the selected folder. Use this tab if you need to transmit your results for whatever reason.

Conclusion

Better Directory Analyzer is a fantastic tool that I recently found and will be using extensively for a while to clean out some backup folders that I have sitting on my hard drive. In terms of tools that are aimed to be used for maintenance and similar tasks, this is one of the better programs that is actually a joy to use. There aren’t any complicated settings that need to be configured, so the experience is simply “install and go”. I definitely recommend this to anyone who could benefit from using it.

What techniques do you use to tame your files? What is your favorite feature about this program? Let us know in the comments!

Image Credit: Shutterstock

Maintaining an organized computer requires a fair bit of discipline. That said you can use some of the following tips to make the task just a little bit easier. These, coupled with a desire to keep things organized can go a long way in helping you arrange files and folders nicely.

Group Content In An Unorganized Folder

As one of the first measures, it really doesn’t take more than a right click and you can set the items to display in groups. Grouping lends the folder some organization. You can choose to group by name, size, type etc.

I usually prefer grouping them by type for the simple reason that somehow the type of file sticks with me longer than its name. Its not rare when you download a video file to view later then forget about it, then it comes to your mind but now you don’t remember its name. However, you still know it’s a video file so you can look around for one if you have grouped items in a folder by type.

Use Libraries

It’s one of the greatest additions to Windows 7. Something which perhaps you couldn’t have written on your wish list, but seeing it in action makes you wonder how you managed without it this long.

Libraries let you view content from multiple folders consolidated into a single view which is called – well a library. So you can have things arranged into different folders all neat and tidy, if you want to view them as if they were in one folder create a new library and add those locations to it. The above tip to group items in a folder still applies to the libraries, but now you have an added advantage that the content is already organized into different folders and you don’t have to mess with it only to view them under a single name.

Digital Janitor Or Belvedere

Libraries are all fine and dandy if you have say your music in different folders, you can still maintain the folder structure and view all music as if they were in a single folder. However what about folders like the “Downloads” folder? It just keeps on growing. No matter how hard you try, there comes a time when it gets the better of the cleanliness freak in you. To rescue you from such situations you can use a couple of software solutions:

Digital Janitor can watch a folder for you and then organize the contents into different folders according to the file extension. Download and run Digital Janitor and it lets you specify the rules that would be used to move and organize the files. Rules are nothing but instructions as to which filetype should end up in which folder. With the rules set you can relax as any file that lands in the monitored folder will be dispatched to its righteous place according to the rules you defined.

Created by the folks over at Lifehacker, Belvedere solves the same problem as Digital Janitor does but offers you finer control over the rules. So if the simple “move files according to extensions” doesn’t cut it for you, give Belvedere a try.

Use A Download Manager

Moving on to organizing the downloads folder, you can use download managers to do some work for you. Leave aside all the acceleration they lend to your download speeds, I am talking of their organizing benefits. Most download managers maintain a history of locations where you have been storing your files. Now in the “Too much mess” situation you would only have a single location in your download manager as well and we would still be at square one. What I have been doing for some time is to create a folder structure (perhaps in the downloads folder) that would keep things nicely organized.

As an example you could create folders like d_setups, d_archives, d_torrents (or anything that suits your need). Now the first time you download a software setup, archive or a torrent file, you would have to tell your download manager to use these locations. However, from the next time, all you have to do is to click on the drop down list and choose the appropriate location according to whatever you are downloading.

Upside: I trust my judgment more than my computer’s.
Downside: Requires two extra clicks which can be two too many for some people!

Manage Archive files Better

Archives are the preferred way to package files for transfer. As a result you find them everywhere – email attachments, source code packages, software bundled inside zip or rar files and what not. A common problem this creates is that the archive file continues to stay on in the folder even after the contents have been extracted. It might be useful to have the archived version in certain cases, but most often that is not the case, so the obvious solution would be that you either delete the archive or the extracted contents. The problem is it can be hard to find which archives have been extracted and which not. In such cases you can either:

• Delete the archive as soon as you have extracted the contents.

• or use wildcards in search to find which archive files have already been extracted and then get rid of them. eg searching for organic* would list organic_design folder as well as financial_docs.zip file. So you know that you have already extracted organic_design.zip and you can go ahead and delete it. Linux (Gnome) users can use Ctrl + s inside nautilus and then specify the pattern. Similar files will then be highlighted in the nautilus window. Keep in mind that this assumes that the archive file contained a similarly named folder or file which is the case very often though not always.

Have you got some tips of your own? Share them with us in the comments.

We have covered other ways to lock windows folders, such as Easy File Locker and TrueCrypt, among others, but My Lockbox is different in many ways. One major feature being that not only will the newly locked windows folder not be able to be accessed directly, but it will disappear completely from view and not viewable from anywhere on your local or networked computers, which is not a common feature among similar applications.

To start, download My Lockbox (Windows only).

The My Lockbox installation should promptly load and is relatively self explanatory, except for one essential part.

Make sure to enter in a secure password that you can easily remember. (Note: For ways to create secure passwords check out these MUO articles.)

The rest of the installation should be pretty simply and standard. Accept the agreement, click “Next”, select a directory, click “Next”, Upon completion of the setup, load My Lockbox from your desktop. What you should see is this:

Simply enter your “Super Duper Secret Password” and BAM! you are in.

To lock Windows folders with My Lockbox, simply browse for a folder anywhere on your computer, and click “Lock.” The status message on the left of the program should change from “Unlocked” to “Locked.”

Furthermore, if you attempt to find the folder in the directory it was located in, for example C:\User\will\Downloads\Documents\ no folder labeled super_secret_folder will show! And if you were apprehensive about My Lockbox simply moving it to the C:\My Lockbox directory as it seemed to state in the install, this is not the case as there does not seem to be any files or folders located there after locking a folder.

The following is what My Lockbox should look like when after you have locked a folder:

My Lockbox can even be set up to open with a hotkey (by default: Ctrl+Shift+P) without the program being open and visible on your task manager at the bottom of the screen.

For even more secrecy and security, delete the My Lockbox desktop icon from view and access the program from the C:\Program Files\My Lockbox directory OR install My Lockbox on a password-protected flash drive for that ultimate (and of course legitimate) computer nerd/spy feeling.

(Note: Although the version of My Lockbox featured here is the free edition, there is also a paid, premium version for $29.95 that allows for the hiding of an unlimited number of folders, unlike the free version which only allows for the hiding of one folder.)

What do you use to keep your important files and folders out of view? Tell us in the comments!

Image Credit: mklingo

Did I forget to mention that the ebook folder was really filled with a lot of titles? It must have had almost 120 ebooks. I almost started manually typing the names when I figured that there must be a less laborious way to print out the directory contents.

Printing directory contents seems so mundane an activity that we forget it has very useful applications in our day to day usage. Especially in a professional setting where you might be told to send over a list of so and so files about such and such subject. In a jiffy. If it’s a small bunch of files then manually writing it down is not a problem. But what if it numbers a few dozen?

Instead of searching for a poor flunky to lend a hand, you can just tap a few keys and get it for yourself. All in double quick time with a few methods.

So let’s work on not one but five ways to print folder and directory contents and get that file list.

Command DOS

This is one command line that’s easy to remember and easy to do.

1. Start the command prompt from Run ““ cmd. Type cd and the directory path of the folder you want to list.
2. Type dir > print.txt
3. Press Enter and exit from the DOS window.
4. Open the folder you wanted the listed file content for and you should see a print.txt file. This is a simple Notepad file that can be copied or printed easily.

Setting A Contextual Menu

A print directory feature can be added to the right-click context menu for a folder. This sends the folder content list directly to the printer. For Windows XP follow these steps:

1. Create a batch file in Notepad by pasting the following text
   

   @echo off
   dir %1 /-p /o:gn > “%temp%\Listing”
   start /w notepad /p “%temp%\Listing”
   del “%temp%\Listing”
   exit

2. Save the file as %windir%\Printdir.bat
   
3. Open Control Panel ““ Folder Options. Click on the File Types tab. Under the registered file types select the entry for Folder. Click on Advanced.
4. In the Edit File Type box, click on New. In the Action box, type Print Directory Listing. In the Application used to perform action box, type printdir.bat.
5. Click on OK and close all boxes.
6. Right-click on any folder and use the Print Directory Listing command to send the list to the printer.

The above instructions and those for Windows Vista can also be found on the Microsoft Help and Support page.

Software solutions introduce a lot of ease and flexibility to the above process. Here are three freeware apps for the listing job:

Karen’s Power Tool

Karen’s Directory Printer brings with it a GUI and rich features that let you print the name of files on your computer with the file’s size, extension, date and time of last modification, and attributes. Also, the list of files can be sorted by name, size, date created, date last modified, or date of last access. Files can also be selectively listed using a filter. Some limited formatting options and selective highlighting for executable files and macros are available.

Karen’s Directory Printer can be included in the right-click context menu. It also works for networked computers. The file list can be sent to the printer or saved as a text file.

Karen’s Directory Printer (v 5.3.1) is a 1.25MB download compatible with Windows XP and Vista.

Display it with Directory List & Print

Directory List & Print is a simpler and smaller solution to the earlier one. The generated lists can be copied to the clipboard and incorporated in other programs. It can be directly inserted into Word and Excel with a click as the data is separated by tabs allowing error free pasting directly into a program like Excel as a table. Along with the file attributes, the program can control the display of file names with or without file extensions. Sorting of the list and integration into the context menus make this a nice alternative to use.

Directory List & Print (v 1.9) does not need an installation which makes this 603KB software a portable solution. The freeware is compatible with Windows 98/2000/XP/Vista.

More Options with JR Directory Printer

This freeware comes in as an even smaller download of 173KB. Select the folder or directory to list, check the display options and click on start to get the list as a text file. The freeware supports lowercase/DOS style filename, file size in KB/bytes, attributes and custom file length. Though the freeware lacks the data control options of the previous applications, it’s a simple utility for a simple task. The download can be unzipped and used without an installation.

JR Directory Printer (v1.2) is compatible with Windows 95/98/2000/NT/ME/XP.

Windows may not have given us the ability to print out folder contents in a user friendly way. But thanks to the workarounds and the freeware, it’s actually a snap. Do you know any other utility to print the contents of a folder? Let us know your way if it differs from any of the above.