To make spotting those files even easier it behooves me to assign a colored tag to them. I can now close that smart folder window without saving it, click the Mac 911 entry that appears under the Tags heading in a Finder window’s sidebar, and see a list of all my Mac 911 files. In a short while, all the files are tagged as I’ve directed. I now select them all, click the Tags button in the window’s toolbar, enter Mac 911, and press Return. The resulting window fills with my Mac 911 files. Use a smart folder to identify taggable items. I then click this condition’s plus-sign (+) button to create a second condition, which reads Contents contains “he writes:” (also with the quotes).

The first of these conditions reads Contents contain “she writes:” (with the quotes, please, as the quotes tell the condition to search for those specific words). The next line reads Any of the following are true. I then hold down the Option key as I click the plus-sign (+) button again to create a conditional condition-one that allows any of the following conditions to work (but doesn’t demand that all of them must be met for the folder to function). To do that, I click the plus-sign (+) button and configure the condition to read Kind is Other and then type text document in the field to the right of the condition. So, I create a smart folder that contains files that match these conditions. Each contains the words he writes: or she writes. Each of those entries is saved in some kind of text format-SimpleText, Plain Text, or BBEdit text. You can, for example, specify a file type, documents that contain certain words, files created on a specific day or within a period of time, or files you’ve placed in a particular location.įor example, twice a week I create entries for my Mac 911 column. How you configure that condition depends on the kind of content you seek. In the resulting window, click the plus-sign (+) button next to the Save button near the top of the window. In the Finder, choose File > New Smart Folder. You just need to be a little smarter about the task. If you have thousands of files on your Mac and the idea of tagging them all makes you queasy, take a deep breath.

Smart folders can help you find the content you’re after.

Focus only on those files that really matter, because you want to more easily retrieve them at a later time. Use Smart Folders to find old files worth tagging

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