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.

History folder visual icon view

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.

change search location

4) Now change Kind from Any to Other and enter Safari history item in the input field, that shows up, after you picked Other.

Kind - Other - Safari history item

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.

Add days to search criteria

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.

Save SmartFolder

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.

Smart Folder in Sidebar

11) Note the slider below the search results, use it to magnify the thumbnails of the visited pages, making it easier identify them.

Magnifying slider below search results

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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