If you are a Mac user, you might definitely praise the Spotlight feature that enables a fast, system-wide search for finding all the installed and saved items. Spotlight is indeed a revelation and it has been the pick of the bunch that Mac OS X offers. But it is not the only feature as there are some efficient and cool features that are underused. One such best but most underused feature is the Smart Folders feature.

Many Mac users are not even aware of the name Smart Folders as don’t realize the advantage of this feature. These smart folders are nothing but saved search results that are got from the Finder sidebar’s “search for” section. As default option, there are three things that are provided as starting point. These include, “all movies”, “all images” and ‘all documents”. Clicking these will list documents that are found relevant to these on your Mac.

Make advantage of these Smart Folders by creating your own folders

The real advantage of these Smart Folders is their ability to allow you create your own folder and customize them to show the contents you frequently access. Creating your own smart folder is not any rocket science in Mac as it is very straight forward. To make your own folder that shows all documents that contain your name, here is a small sequence of steps you need to follow. Just open a Finder window and type your name in the spotlight search that appears in the top corner. All items that match your name would be listed. It would also contain files in which your name is a part of the content. You could refine the search to list only file names with your name by selecting the file name only option. You can also add further attributes and still fine tune your search by clicking on the + button.

Adding more attributes will help you get finer and tuned results. Once you are happy with the list of documents that are listed you can save your Smart Folder with any name. On the save list, type the name of the Smart Folder and leave the default save location field alone. You can click on the “Add To Sidebar” option to add this folder to your finder sidebar. You can also remove the folder by just un dragging it from the toolbar. To restore the removed Smart folder you need to do to ~/Library/Saved Searches and drag it back to the sidebar. You can also edit these folder by changing the Search criteria using more attributes and save them again.

Source: techradar