Organising files
Stacks is the rare organising feature that costs nothing to adopt: right-click the Desktop, Use Stacks, and eighty scattered icons collapse into a handful of tidy piles. What it does not do is also worth knowing.
Right-click the Desktop → Use Stacks. Files group into piles by kind — Images, PDFs, Screenshots get their own stack. Click a stack to fan it out; click again to close. Drag onto a stack to add; the files remain ordinary Desktop files underneath, so nothing about their location changes.
Group Stacks By (same menu) offers date added — a chronological Desktop where yesterday's work forms its own pile — and tags, for those who tag.
Stacks arranges; it does not reduce. The 400 files are still 400 files on the Desktop, still individually indexed, still syncing to iCloud if Desktop & Documents syncing is on. A Desktop with years of accumulation deserves one real pass: screenshots to a folder, active files to their projects, the rest to an archive folder. Stacks then keeps the *new* accumulation presentable.
Most Desktop clutter is screenshots. Redirecting them (⇧⌘5 → Options → Save to a Screenshots folder) removes the largest inflow; Stacks handles the remainder; a weekly sweep of the fanned-out stacks takes a minute. The Desktop stops being a filing system and returns to being a desk.
Stacks changes browsing, not searching — a file on the Desktop is found the same way regardless of stacking. Which is the deeper point: once search is the retrieval mechanism, the Desktop's job is temporary staging, and Stacks makes temporary staging look deliberate.
No. Files stay on the Desktop; Stacks only changes how Finder draws them. Turning it off restores the scatter exactly.
Group-by options exist in any Finder window, but proper Stacks are a Desktop-only feature.
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