Mac is a popular operating system introduced by Apple Inc. in January 1984. It was the first operating system that employed Graphical User Interface (GUI) and still continues to be a major rival to the Microsoft Windows operating system.
Mac is often credited by experts for simplifying access to the World Wide Web (WWW) and for replacing the obsolete, low capacity, unreliable floppy disks with high-speed Universal Serial Bus (USB) devices.
MacOS Mojave (Liberty), the latest and stable release of Mac OS, offers many powerful features, built-in apps and an automatic organization of your files using a cool feature called Desktop Stacks.
Stacks keeps your documents and files organized and well managed. It groups together files, making your Desktop clutter-free. Here are some of the ways it groups your files:
- Group Files By Kind: This option groups your files by their kind such as pictures, screenshots, documents, PDFs, presentations, and so on.
- Group Files By Date of Modification: Categorizes your documents and files with the time frame of file modification.
- File Tags: If you’ve already added tags to your files, Stacks can sort and group files through their tags.
Moreover, MacOS Mojave brings out a newer dramatic look with subtle colors and less cluttered screen. This helps the user focus on their work with a distraction-free and clean interface. This applies not only to Apple products, but other third-party developers can also adopt this feature in their applications.
Gallery View
Gallery View feature is a part of the Finder app. It provides limited information about your files at a quick glance without needing to open them at all. This information includes file creation date, author, image resolution, last modification date, image dimension and coloring profile.
You may also find instant shortcuts to rotate your images, markup, and password protect and create PDFs.
Instantly Capture Your Snaps
Unlike the Snipping Tool application in Windows that offers taking only image screenshots, Mac also offers video recording user’s screen with the Snap utility. You can happily use the automatic timer utility to capture high-quality screenshots and video recordings.
FileVault
FileVault is an encryption feature that protects your information while you work and travel.
All you’ve got to do is set a strong password or a recovery key to decrypt your sensitive information such as client information, project files, and website passwords. Although default encryption is applicable to only the Startup Disk, you can expand it further to the Time Machine Backups.
Link Mac to Your iPhone
If your iPhone is connected to the Mac, any photo you capture with it will be instantly available on your Mac. This synchronization feature is especially helpful to keep your stuff organized at one place and help you keep track of every little bit of the stuff that matters.
Configure Your Privacy Settings to Protect Your Information
Mac gives you full control over your information. In a single tab, you’ll be able to choose the information you want to share with Apple and third-party developers. This is of great help to protect user’s privacy and confidentiality.
All you’ve got to do is to go to the Mac Preferences and head to the Security & Privacy dialog. You’d be able to see a whole list of installed apps that are accessing and collecting your information.
For example: Applications such as Evernote, Weather, BusyCal may use the Location Services to determine the user’s exact location. Besides, there are other apps also that may access your contact information, calendar events, reminders/ alerts.
With just a few clicks, you can easily decide on approving/ disapproving sharing data with those applications.
There are other apps that provide Facebook, Twitter & Linkedin with log-in authentication to reduce the sign-in interval time. Such apps may collect your personal information such as full name, photos, date of birth, among others. You can disassociate your social media accounts with those apps as well.
Duplicate Files in Mac
Duplicate files can be termed as digital junk that keep eating the capacity of your SSD, and not to mention, make your Mac run slower in some cases.
As a result of duplicate files, individuals and businesses may find themselves in a constant spot of worry to come up with ways to store their ever-increasing data.
Regularly cleaning duplicates can benefit you in several ways:
- Controls wastage of the SSD’s storage space.
- Organize your files in a better way.
- Reduce the time taken by the Finder application to search your information.
- Cut business costs on acquiring infrastructure to store data.
- Dramatically improve your Mac’s performance by eliminating the duplicates. Enjoy faster system performance, lighter machine and clutter-free Desktop & file system.
Manually Find Duplicate Files with Finder
Though the Mac doesn’t contain any in-house functionality to search duplicate documents and files, there is a way to find duplicates using the Finder. Here’s how:
- Click the Finder icon on the Dock.
- Click the File menu, followed by New Smart Folder.
- Click the Plus sign (+) on the top right corner of the toolbar.
- You can narrow down the scan for certain kind of files. To search for only duplicate documents, use the Document option in the Kind drop-down box and then choose your preferred file extension, such as RTF or TXT.
- Select the Content option in the Kind drop-down box. Type the common text that you want to search in all Document files.
- You’ll get a list of all documents that match the common text you entered.
- Click + Drag to select multiple files, and move them to the Trash.
Find Duplicate with Clone Files Checker
Duplicate files cannot be found in a single folder. They are scattered across different locations of the SSD, making it humanly impossible to compare files and find duplicates manually.
Clone Files Checker for Mac is a handy tool that uses powerful algorithms to bulk scan for duplicates. With a few steps, you can get a list of duplicates. In essence, CFC takes the pain out of having to review each file.
You can check out all the salient features of CFC for Mac on this page.
- Download the Clone Files Checker dmg file, and use it to install CFC.
- Launch the software now so that CFC can do what it does best.
- Click the Add button on the left side of the main user interface and select any/ all locations (in a single scan) which you want to rid of duplicates.
- Select the scan criteria such as minimum and maximum file sizes, and the kind of files such as documents, music, videos, archives, among others. However, please remember that this step is a totally optional one.
- Click on Start Search to launch the scan and wait for some time so that the scan gets over and brings up results.
- Next, all you’ve to do is deselect the files you want to retain and select all others (which will either be deleted or moved to a folder). Even though you can do so manually, a more efficient and speedy method to select them is by clicking the Select Duplicates button and choosing which kind of files you want to retain, e.g. oldest, newest, biggest, smallest etc.
- Click on Select Action, and choose between Permanent Delete and Move to Folder.
Cleaning up duplicates files on your Mac is this easy and safe with Clone Files Checker. Give it a try; you’ll be pleasantly surprised with every aspect of this program.
Raza Ali Kazmi works as an editor and technology content writer at Sorcim Technologies (Pvt) Ltd. He loves to pen down articles on a wide array of technology related topics and has also been diligently testing software solutions on Windows & Mac platforms. If you have any question about the content, you can message me or the company's support team.