Get all the information on your files
Mac OS X does a great job of providing you with information on the files on your hard drive. Today we will look at how to show all kind of information on your files.
Get Information on a single file
To display information for a single file or folder, control-click it and pick Get Info.
This will bring up a window containing all kinds of information on the file, such as creating date, file size, and much more. Depending on the file type additional information is presented.
This is a lot of information at once, so let’s look at it in detail. We will go through each section. You can contract and expand each section by clicking the triangle in front of the section name.
Spotlight Comments
Spotlight - the fast Desktop search for Mac OS X (which you can launch through the magnification glass in the top right corner) does not only search file by file name, but can also look at custom comments you assign to certain files in the Spotlight Comments window.
For example, let’s put “client1″ into Spotlight Comments of a file, named “Bluehound.gif”
As we perform a Spotlight search, this file will be found because of the matching Spotlight comment.
This is very handy to find files, which are spread across a directory structure.
General
This section contains all kind of general information on the selected file, such as kind, file size, storage location, etc.
Label allows you to assign a color label to a file. You can use this to categorize files to certain areas (for example, you could assign the green color label to all documents relating to your personal finances).
In Finder, these files will show up with the color you chose as background color, making it easier to identify them.
Hint: You can also assign a color by control-clicking a file and picking a color from the contextual menu.
More info
This sections shows you additional information, depending on the file type. As displayed in the following screen shot, dimension and color space for a picture file (.gif)
For other file types (such as music files or documents) this section will look different. Check it out by yourself.
Name and Extension
Extensions are a thing very important to switchers, since other platforms use the extension (the three letters after the dot in the file name) to indicate the type of file you’re dealing with.
Mac OS X handles things a bit different and doesn’t necessarily need file name extensions (this information is stored along with the file).
Moreover, Mac OS X - by default - hides common extensions, such as those for images.
Check the box Hide extension in the File Info window to display/hide the file extension on an individual file basis.
And here is how to display the file extension for all files:
1) Open Finder Preferences (via the Finder menu > Preferences)
2) Switch to the Advanced Tab
3) Check Show all file extensions
Hint: Mac OS X does not need file extensions to be able to handle files correctly, but other platforms do. So, if you exchange files with people working on other platforms, always make sure the files have the correct extension.
Open With
This is an important one. You can define a certain file to open with a specific application, while all other files (of the same type) continue to open with the standard application (e.g. Preview for all images and .pdf files)
Click Change All… to change the standard application this type of file (e.g. all “.gif” files) is opened with.
Preview
If possible, this sections shows a small preview of the file. This is the same as you see if you view your files in Finder as Icons (In Finder: View menu > As Icons)
Sharing and Permissions
Mac OS X does a good job of protecting your personal files. If you happen to share your Mac with other users, this can be really important as you don’t want others to see and be able to edit your personal files.
As Sharing and Permissions is such a big topic, we will not go into full detail and only cover basic usage right now.
Click the lock icon to be able to make changes. You can assign certain users and user groups the right to read and/or write your files and folders. If you don’t have the Permission to see the content of a folder, it will look like this:
Folders that you can only write to, but not display the content is called a drop box. Once it’s in you can’t retrieve it again (since you can write to the folder, but are not allow to display the content - like a balloting box). A Drop Box folders look like this:
The Public folder in every user’s home directory is a folder, every other user can access. So that’s a good way to exchange files between users, but maintain your privacy.
This concludes the File Info roundup. Be sure to check out Mac OS X special features such as Spotlight comments and color labels. They can be extremely useful to organize your files in more ways as only with folders.
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Tags: Desktop, file handling, finder, general, organize
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