Customize your visual web history
Previously, we looked at how to create a true, visual web history. Today, we will take things one step further, customizing the history to our needs.We added the Safari history folder to the Finder Sidebar, so we could access our web history in a visual way. While this is great and everything, it can quickly get a bit full in there.
Don’t panic - help is on the way. We will use another great and useful feature of Mac OS X - Smart Folders. Smart Folders allow us to dynamically build a folder, based on certain search criteria.
First, let’s look at the content of the web history folder, as it is now.
Not a very good way to quickly find something. What can we do about it? What’s easy to answer is, whether we visited a page in the last, say, 3, 5 or 10 days. Let’s use this information to quickly find the web page we are looking for.
Setup
With the help of Smart Folders, we can display all web history items of the last 3 days with one click. Here is how to it up.
1) Open the History folder from your Sidebar (as in the picture above).
2) From the Finder File menu, select Find…
3) Change the search location to “History” by simply clicking on it.
4) Now change Kind from Any to Other and enter Safari history item in the input field, that shows up, after you picked Other.
5) Immediately all history items will show up. Click the plus on the right side of that input field to add another criteria.
6) The default criteria is Last opened date, which is exactly what we need. Enter 3 in the field for days and see, how your changes instantly reflect in the search results.
Now you see all web pages, you visited in the last 3 days.
8) To create a Smart Folder out of these search results, simply click Save in the upper right corner.
9) Give it a name and make sure, you have the option Add to Sidebar checked.
10) This Smart Folder is added to your Sidebar in the Search For
section. Simply drag an item up (or down) to rearrange this list of Smart Folders.
11) Note the slider below the search results, use it to magnify the thumbnails of the visited pages, making it easier identify them.
Smart Folders are a great way to quickly find things on your Mac - not only web history items.
Go ahead and try to create some of your own. Drop a comment and tell us, how you use Smart Folders.
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Tags: eye candy, QuickLook, Safari, Smart Folder, visual information, web history
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