I’ve seen a lot of cluttered and disorganized Downloads folders on Mac. A lot. For me, at least, it’s much easier to keep my downloaded files cleaned up and organized if I download to my Desktop which I’m constantly looking at then to download to the downloads folder which I don’t pay attention to until it gets too cluttered to find anything.
So if you’re the same way, it’s good to know that you can change where Safari, Firefox, and Chrome automatically put their downloads.
So for today’s article, let’s go over how to change the default download folder on the Mac!
That’s pretty much all there is to it. Gemini 2 will delete duplicate files in your Photos, Downloads, Mail Downloads, iTunes, and all the other locations on your disk. It’s by far, the easiest and fastest way to find and delete all of the duplicates on your Mac. Find duplicate files with a Terminal. Mar 03, 2021 Browsers aside, you may also find other apps—such as Apple Pages—storing file copies offline inside iCloud Drive or On My iPhone/iPad. If you have difficulty finding a downloaded file, you can try searching for it by tapping the Search field at the top of the Files app.
Luckily, the process of changing the default download directory pretty similar in the three main Mac browsers.
Change the Default Download Location in Safari
- Open the Safari app and click on the Safari drop-down menu at the top left.
- Choose Preferences.
- Make sure General tab is selected and then change the File Download Location to wherever you want.
As you can see, I’ve got mine set to “Desktop,” but you can pick an alternate location with that “Other” choice. Clicking “Other” will bring you to the familiar macOS open/save dialog box, from which you can select any folder you want to use.
If you’re feeling really fancy, you could instead change that toggle shown in my second screenshot above to “Ask for each download,” which will mean that you can file away everything you download exactly where you want it to go, every time. While this is a nifty feature but it can get cumbersome to have to choose a download location for each and every download you do.
Change the Default Download Location in Firefox
With the Firefox browser, you’ll start the same way as you did with Safari.
- Launch Firefox and click on its named menu(i.e. the FireFox pulldown menu) in the upper lefthand corner.
- Select Preferences.
- Under the General tab, at the label: Save files to click choose and select the folder you want your downloads to go to.
Again, the “Always ask me where to save files” radio button you see above will make Firefox ask you each time you initiate a download.
Change the Default Download Location in Chrome
Google made it just a teeny bit harder to change your default downloads folder in the Chrome browser, but the steps begin the same way as the other two browsers.
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- Launch Chrome and select the Chrome menu from the top of your screen.
- Select Preferences.
- Scroll down the settings on the side menu until you see Advanced. Click on it.
- Choose Downloads.
- Click on Change next to Location and select the folder you want your downloads to go to.
As with Safari and Firefox, there’s a choice to make the browser ask you where to put the file you’re downloading every time.
As Steve Jobs used to say, “Oh yeah, there’s one more thing.”
Mail also uses the Downloads folder to store attachments you save, so if you’d like to be really thorough, you could change that, too.
Click on the Mail pulldown menu at the top of Mail then select Preferences. Next, under the General tab, you can change the download location just as you can with the web browsers:
So now that you’ve got all of your browsers (and Mail!) set to do exactly what you need them to, you can go forward knowing that your Downloads folder will never get too cluttered and disorganized again. Getting things done is so much easier when you stay organized. Bartender software 10.0 crack.
If you’re a Mac user and enjoyed this article, you might want to check out this TechJunkie article: How To Flush the DNS in Mac Mojave.
Do you have any tips or tricks for managing downloads on your Mac? If so, we’d love to hear from you in a comment below!
The scenario is straightforward: You receive a message with an attachment in Mail and double-click the attached file to open it in the appropriate app. But what happens next is anything but straightforward: file attachments are stored in a hard-to-find folder; they are sometimes downloaded more than once; and different apps treat these opened files in very different ways.
Where is /Mail Downloads?
When you open a Mail attachment with a double-click, it opens in its parent app, just as you’d expect. But it’s also automatically (and secretly) downloaded into the aptly named Mail Downloads folder.
How To Find Downloads On Mac Pro
The folder’s name is the only thing that’s obvious about it: it’s deeply buried in a series of folders, one of which is invisible. To view its contents, choose Go > Go to Folder in the Finder, type (or copy and paste from here) ~/Library/Containers/com.apple.mail/Data/Library/Mail Downloads, and click Go.
You should visit this folder sometime if only because it probably has at least a gigabyte of detritus, much of which you could probably trash. You’ll likely find hundreds of folders (my husband’s Mac had 1800 of them) with alphanumeric names, each holding a downloaded attachment. That seemingly inefficient setup is necessary in order to avoid having identically named attachments saved to the same folder.
Prior to OS 10.9 Mavericks, this folder was located at ~/Library/Mail Downloads. If you upgraded from an earlier system, that folder may still be around. If so, you should check it for leftovers; although its contents should have been automatically migrated to the new folder, I recently found I still had items sitting in mine. You won’t find enclosing folders in that older folder; in previous operating systems, identically named downloads had numbers appended to their names in order to differentiate them.
What goes in Mail Downloads?
An attachment is automatically saved to the Mail Downloads folder whenever you:
Open the file with a double-click or with the Open Attachment command in its contextual menu.
Control-click a file and use any contextual menu command. If you Control-click but then change your mind and just let the menu close—too late! A copy is stored the moment you open the menu.
Use Quick Look to view it.
An additional copy of the attachment goes to Mail Downloads every time you repeat any of the above actions after having “left” and then “returned to” the message window. This includes when you: close and reopen the message window; look at a different message in the Viewer window and come back to the one with the attachment; and quit and re-launch Mail.
An attachment doesn’t go to Mail Downloads when you save it, which you can do with File > Save Attachments or by using the pop-up menu accessible from the gray header/message divider line when you hover anywhere in the message header. In those cases, it’s saved wherever you put it.
What happens when you edit an attachment?
How To Find Downloads On Mac Computer
When you open an attachment directly from a Mail message into its parent app, your edits sometimes seem to be saved and sometimes not. Why is that? And why do those edits sometimes seem to alter the original attachment? It all depends on the attachment’s default app.
Let’s say, for example, that you double-click an attachment that by default opens in a Microsoft or Adobe app. That attachment is then saved to the Mail Downloads folder (as explained above) and opened in its associated app. If you edit the document and use the Save command (not Save As), the edited version replaces the original file in the Mail Downloads folder. If you use the Open Recent command in the app later, it opens that altered copy.
Don’t install them to the USB drive or an external hard drive by mistake! Please note, you don’t need to select the “Force Cache Rebuild” option which is shown in my picture. When you’re done, click the button to patch the machine and reboot. Mine was called Macintosh HD.
But say you want to go back and check something in the original attached file. In Mail, you double-click the attachment again or take a Quick Look peek, reasonably assuming that you’ll get the unedited original. Sometimes you will and sometimes you won’t. Sometimes?
Go To Downloads Mac
If you haven’t closed the message with the attached file and try to view the “original” attachment, Mail will show you the copy that’s stored in Mail Downloads—the one you edited. But if you do close the message, then reopen it and double-click the attachment, you will see the original version. That’s because Mail saves a fresh copy of the attachment to Mail downloads when you reopen the message, and that’s the file that opens.
How To Find Downloads On Mac
To avoid this mess, the best way to open an attachment in one of these non-Apple programs is to first explicitly save it from Mail into an appropriate folder with File > Save Attachments or by using the Attachments pop-up menu on the header divider. Then you can open and edit that copy of the file in the app.
Apple apps such as Pages, Numbers, TextEdit, and Preview—as well as Nisus Writer Pro (kudos!)—treat attachments differently. When you double-click a file attachment belonging to one of those apps, its title bar changes to Untitled (OriginalName copy). In other words, it’s treated as a new document, so you can’t inadvertently save over the original version in Mail Downloads. As a result, if you view or reopen the original from within Mail, you always see the original version.
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