The Sidebar--found on the left-hand side of an open Finder window--can be a great way to navigate your Mac. We’ll take a look at  how to bring the Sidebar under control and expand its use.

Poof: Lost Sidebar Items

One annoying feature of the Sidebar is how easily it is to delete an item with the slip of the mouse.  It's a problem that many new, and experienced, Mac users encounter. Initially the Finder Sidebar appears as below:

To remove any of these items you can simply drag the icon out of the Sidebar and it disappears in a puff of smoke. This is what confounds users who don’t know where to go to get it back. Coupled with the fact that there is no warning that this will happen.

You can get these default items back by going to the Finder Preferences. In the Finder, go to the menu bar and select Finder>Preferences, or press CMD+comma. Next, click the Sidebar button appearing at the top of the Finder Preferences pane. Look for any options where the checkbox is empty.

Click on that box. A checkmark appears. Viola! What was lost, is found, and back in the Sidebar where it belongs.

Adding Places: Customize the Sidebar

One of the more useful features of the Finder is, while it's easy to delete items from the Sidebar, it's even easier to add your own items. These items are shortcuts to files and folders that are accessible from any Finder window.  Your additions appear in the section called “Places.“  By default OS X does not list all of the places you might go on your Mac.

In our example we added the folders that contain: Downloads, Movies, Music, Library, Pictures, Public and Sites. However, we could have added any folder located on our Mac. None of these appear in the Finder Preferences pane.

The folders were added to the Sidebar by simply dragging and dropping the appropriate folder onto the Sidebar. Remove them by simply dragging and dropping them outside of the Sidebar.  Using this method you can customize your Finder Sidebar to your heart's content.

Now with this knowledge you have better control of the Finder's Sidebar.