Be Creative and Personalize your Mac’s Folders

Creating Folders and Subfolders

You probably have all sorts of data in your Home folder: tax information, personal letters, artwork, poetry, music you’ve created with GarageBand, letters of complaint, confirmations from bills you’ve paid online, and other data. Take inventory and decide on some categories, and then follow these steps to create folders (you’ll use these same steps to create subfolders and folders in other default folders, including the Desktop folder):

1. Open the Finder and select your user name.

2. From the Action menu, choose New Folder.

3. Type a name for the folder and press Return on the keyboard.

To create a subfolder in any folder, open that folder and perform the same steps. With the appropriate folders created, you can now move forward and start organizing!

Organizational Ideas for the Creative

When creating folders and subfolders, take a moment to think about what you use your Mac for the most. The hardware you have connected to your Mac generally gives you a clue there. Do you have iPods, digital cameras, DV cameras, or musical instruments hooked up? If so, you should start there. If you need a little help deciding what folders to create, what to name them, and where to store them, consider these ideas:

· If you have a digital camera and take a lot of pictures, create folders with subfolders that are named after the type of pictures you’ve taken: Weddings, Vacations, Wild Parties, Building Our Home, and folders for each of your children and each of your pets.

· If you are a freelance artist or run a graphics company, create folders that contain artwork for specific companies or clients. You might also have folders for artwork in progress, finished artwork you can archive, and artwork ideas.

· If you have a scanner and are the family genealogist, create a folder named Scans and create subfolders for each branch of the family tree.

· If you use an iPod regularly, create a folder on your desktop (or an alias to your Music or iTunes folder) so that you can access those files quickly.

· If you create GarageBand projects for fun or profit, organize your GarageBand tunes by date created, by name, by client, or by song.

· If you have a DV camera and take a lot of video, create subfolders inside the Movies folder that are named after the type of movies you’ve created.

The idea is to take a good, hard look at what you use your Mac for and create folders that represent who you are and what you do. Not only will creating folders and subfolders make data easier to find, with everything in one place, it’ll make it easier to work with too.