What If You Don’t Want To Open The File?

The idea behind Spotlight is that it will find the file you want, and then open that file for you, so you can start working on it immediately. But what if you just want to know where the file is, and not necessarily open it? (For example, what if you just want to know where it is, so you can burn a backup copy to a CD?) To do that, once the results appear in the spotlight menu, just hold the Command key and then click on the file. This will close Spotlight and open the Finder window where your file is. Or if you want Spotlight open, just click on the file and press Command-R, which will open a Finder window with the file selected, leaving the spotlight dialog open.

You’re Two Clicks from a Photo’s EXIF Data

When you take a photo with a digital camera, the camera embeds info directly into the file, including the make and model of camera, the exposure, shutter speed, and a host of other info (called eXiF data). That info is usually viewed within an application like Photoshop or iPhoto, but now you can view it right from the Finder.

Just click on the photo’s icon, then press Command-i to bring up the info dialog. When it appears, click on the right-facing triangle beside the words “More info” and the basic eXiF data will appear.

Speed Navigating in Save As, Part 2

Want to speed things up by using the keyboard to get around in the Save As dialog? There’s just one thing you have to do first — press the Tab key. That removes the highlighting from the Save As naming field, and changes the focus on the sidebar (notice the blue highlight rectangle around the sidebar shown here). Once the sidebar is highlighted, you can use the Up/Down Arrow keys to move up and down the sidebar. Press Tab again and the search field is active. Press Tab once more and the Column (or list) view is highlighted, and you can use the Arrow keys on your keyboard to quickly get right where you want to be. When you get there, press the Tab key again to highlight the Save As field so you can name your file, and then hit the Return key to “make it so!”

Note: if you don’t see the sidebar or viewing modes, click on the little blue down-facing arrow button to the right of the Save As field.

Address Book: See Which Groups They’re In

If you have a contact that appears in more than one Group, you can instantly see which of your Groups this individual appears in by simply clicking on his or her contact and holding the Option key. When you do this, every Group that they appear within will become highlighted.
This is handy if you want to clean up your Groups by deleting extra instances of people who appear in multiple Groups.

Searching Just Your Bookmarks

If you’re trying to search for a particular bookmark, you’ll want to know this trick: First, click on the Show All Bookmarks icon in the top-left corner of the Bookmarks Bar. Doing this makes the Collections column visible on the left side of Safari, but more importantly, it adds a Search field at the bottom center of the Safari window. When you type search terms in this field, it searches just within your bookmarks, so you get super-fast results.

Preview: Hidden Sorting Options

When you open multiple images in Preview, they appear in the Drawer. You can sort them manually by dragging them up and down the list, but there’s another way—if you Control-click on one of the images in the Drawer, a contextual menu will appear, and you can then sort by name, size, keyword, and more.

Dropping Text on the Dock for Fast Results

Let’s say you’re reading an article online, and you read a sentence that you want to email to a friend. Don’t do the copy-and-paste thing. Instead, just highlight the text and drag-and-drop it right on the Mail icon in the Dock. It will open Mail and put that sentence into a new mail message. This tip also works in other Cocoa applications like TextEdit, Stickies, and Safari. For example, if you’re reading a story and want to do a Google search on something you’ve read, just highlight the text and drag-and-drop it on the Safari icon in the Dock. It will launch Safari and display the Google Search Results.

Get to Your Top Hit Fast

If you do a search and notice that the file it chose as your Top Hit in the Spotlight menu is actually the file you were looking for (hey, it could happen), just press-and-hold the Command key to jump right to the Top Hit, then press Return to open that document (or song, email, etc.), which closes the Spotlight menu. See, it even tidies up after you. So basically, just press Command-Return to instantly open the Top Hit. Easy enough.

Finding the Combined Size of More than One Document

Let’s say you have several files on your desktop, and before you copy them all onto your jump drive, you want to find out their combined size. Here’s how it’s done: Select all the files for which you want the combined size, then press Command-Option-I, which brings up the Multiple Item Info dialog, complete with a list of how many files are selected and their combined size.