Your home on the Mac, Finder gives you lots of options for locating, displaying and organizing all your files and folders. From the power of Spotlight search technology to the flexibility of customizable item views, Mac OS X Finder truly shows your Mac at a glance.

Spotlight on Finder

Searching for files and folders using the Finder’s search field is smarter, faster and more flexible than ever, thanks to Spotlight. Just like in the Spotlight menu bar search field, you can add descriptive and explanatory terms to your Finder search. For example, if you’re looking for text or Office documents, use Author, Creation Date or Project Name. For graphics, you could indicate the Image Size or Resolution to narrow your list. Simply pick the search criteria from the menu and the Finder tailors your results instantly. File and document contents are automatically indexed, so you can perform powerful full-text searches.

In addition to searching on traditional file properties, such as name, text content or file extension, you can use new keywords such as “Document,” “Image” or “Movie” to indicate the kind of file you’re looking for. You can even indicate relative time periods using convenient keywords such as “Today,” “Yesterday” and “Last Week.”

Look Smart

Smart Folders contain documents grouped together based on search criteria that you define instead of their physical location. Computer file systems are rigid: a file can only be in one folder inside a hierarchy of other folders on your disk. Smart Folders fundamentally change the way you organize your stuff because now a file can literally be in two folders (or many) at once without duplicating or moving the underlying file.

Like Smart Playlists in iTunes, Smart Folders automatically update in real time when you add or remove documents from your Mac. They can contain documents from anywhere in your home directory and external drives, and creating one is as easy as saving a search in the Finder.

Find Your Way

The sidebar — visible in the left-hand pane of every open window — lists hard drives, network volumes, your .Mac iDisk, optical media and other accessible volumes at the top. The sidebar identifies removable volumes such as CDs, DVDs, iPods, FireWire and USB hard drives and flash memory cards with a triangular eject symbol which you can click to dismount the drive — you never need to drag a volume to the Trash.

You can customize the sidebar with your favorite folders by dragging them to the lower section of the sidebar. These favorite folders provide convenient shortcuts to get to current projects and a quick way to copy files.

When you select a volume or folder in the sidebar, it becomes the starting point for what you see in Column View, so you rarely need to scroll to get to your destination, even in small Finder windows. And the sidebar doesn’t let you lose your place — when you make a Finder window smaller, the icons and text of the sidebar scale dynamically, so you always see a maximum number of items, without scrolling.

Open Sesame

Best of all, this navigation method is available to you when you open and save files in any application. You’ll see that the sidebar can browse files in either list view or column view. That makes it super convenient to open a file on your iDisk or network server without switching to the Finder first to mount the remote disks.

Show and Burn

Tiger makes the Finder your one-stop media shop. Create a full-screen slideshow of any selected images right in the Finder. Or burn a CD or data DVD directly from the Finder by quickly creating a “burn folder” where you can drag and drop the files you want to save.

Put It in Context

The Action menu gives you access to contextual Finder commands based on the current selection. Maybe you want to label files or move items to the trash. The Action menu also gives you a handy way to get more information about a file. If you have a two-button mouse, you can also right-click on an item to bring up the menu. Also, you can open the menu by holding down the control key while clicking on an item with a one-button mouse.