How To Create Smart Folders In The OS X Finder

June 29th, 2008

In Leopard you may have noticed a few folders titled “All Images”, “All Movies”, and “All Documents” hanging out at the bottom of the left side panel in your Finder windows. These are “Smart Folders” based on persistent searches for files and folders meeting certain criteria. The cool thing is - you can create your own.

In the Finder, go to File > New Smart Folder.

A new bar appears in the Finder window that lets you set up criteria for your search. The concept is similar to “Smart Playlists” in iTunes. You can add new bars for additional search criteria using the “+” button on the right.

After clicking “+” a new bar is created with drop down lists of common search criteria. That may suffice, but if you choose “Other” from the drop down, there’s a huge list of even more criteria you can search for.

As an example, from the larger list of search attributes, I chose “pixel width” to find only images of a certain width. Most of the images on my blog are JPEGs at a width of 500 pixels, so I’m setting up a search that would show me blog images, wherever they may be on my hard drive.

When you’re done setting up your search, click “Save” and a new Smart Folder appears in the sidebar of any Finder window. Here’s mine called “Blog Images”.

To change the search criteria after you’ve created it, select the Smart Folder, click the wheel icon at the top of the Finder window, and choose “Show Search Criteria”.