Filed under: Mac 101
Mac 101: Hide Hard Drives, CDs, etc on your Desktop
I like a relatively neat Desktop. I keep out just those items I need to access right away for my day-to-day work. It's so easy to clutter Finder, especially when you use multiple hard drives and partitions, an iPod, a memory card reader and the odd CD or DVD. An often-overlooked Finder preference can come to the rescue.
To hide volumes on your Desktop, choose Finder -> Preferences (or just type Command-, when Finder is active). In the General tab, choose which items you want to show on your Desktop. Place a check next items you want to see or clear the checkboxes to hide items. You can always bring hidden items back by updating your preferences later.
And don't forget: whether you hide disks or CDs on your desktop, they're always there on the side drawer of your Finder windows where you'll find all hard drives, servers, removable media and so forth.
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Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
Bryan said 3:10PM on 4-27-2007
Is there any way to turn off drives on a case by case basis? For example, hiding the Boot Camp partition but showing the default OS drive?
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Pepe said 3:30PM on 4-27-2007
Wow, I like the 101 series even though (or perhaps exactly because) I am a vetran and thus stuck in what I know. [Political pun not intended but also not rejected ;-]
So yea, like poster #1, is that possible?
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Sarah said 3:34PM on 4-27-2007
Another longtime user to whom it had never even occurred that this was possible. Hooray!
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imnotjesus said 3:35PM on 4-27-2007
It's also possible to drag specific drives, network shares, etc off of the sidebar in the Finder, which is the opposite of this tip, but happens to be what I do. I find using Exposé to access the desktop slightly more convenient than opening a new finder window to access my connected shares/drives. To each her own!
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Ahmad said 4:04PM on 4-27-2007
lol, it's surprising to me that some people (even the 'veterans') don't know such simple things about OS X. I poke and prod in all corners of my Mac whenever I'm bored.
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Helge said 4:13PM on 4-27-2007
You can easily customise which drives are going to show on the desktop - just make an alias. We use this to let our student users only see their Documents folder. The other handy option you can set in the Finder Preferences is, which folder or volume is displayed when you open a new Finder window. With the Side bar, we found that you mustn't remove the network icon, as this will cause network shares not to show when browsing.
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Darrell said 4:15PM on 4-27-2007
Fantastic! I was just thinking about that the other day. I have a whole bunch of networked external drives on my desktop that I've been wanted gone, so this is great! Also, I think it is overwhelmingly agreed upon that this is a great series. Even though this is the first bit I've come across that I wasn't aware of, it's a place I send all my newb mac owner friends. Keep it up!
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Leonard Nimrod said 4:39PM on 4-27-2007
I like to show my CD/ DVDs on my desktop, but selectign the box also brings the iDisk to the dekstop. I don't use the iDisk accept for backing up so I really don't want it there.
I can't use the alias truck since the drives come and go with each new CD/DVD.
Is there a way to disallow or hide just the iDisk?
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(01) said 8:27PM on 4-27-2007
I only have connected drives and CD/DVDs show up on my desktop, I like the clutter free look and it's not that hard to open up a finder window to access the drives on the sidebar. Good tip.
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Doug said 10:39PM on 4-27-2007
Hey Leonard, that iDisk thing was a royal pain in the tookus for a long time. I just turned off all disk displays in order to get rid of it. That is, until I found a hint (can't remember where). Go the the .Mac pane of System Preferences, and under the Sign In tab, just clear your username and password from their respective fields. Voila, no more iDisk icon on the desktop without having to turn off all disks.
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falconstein said 6:05AM on 4-28-2007
I don't understand this part: "just type Command-, when Finder is active".
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Leonard Nimrod said 4:55PM on 4-29-2007
@ Doug,
Thanks, but I use my iDisk so I need enabled. If you go to the iDisk tab of the .Mac preference pane you can turn off iDisk Syncing, which will also remove the iDisk icon form your desktop. I then have to remember to sync manually, so it's not an ideal solution. I wish there was a hack to rename the desktop item with period to make it invisible.
@ falconstein,
It means depress the Command key (aka: Apple Key) and the Comma key. It does look like a pause in the sentence.
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