How to organize your Mac desktop with Stacks

In this tutorial, we’ll show you how to use the Stacks feature to declutter and streamline your Mac desktop, simplifying organization for increased productivity.

MacBook desktop showing the stacks feature

If you’re one of those folks who keep lots of data (or file shortcuts) on your Mac desktop, the desktop stacks tool in macOS is for you. With stacks, you can:

  • Organize the messiest of desktops by arranging files into relevant piles
  • Group by kind to stacks of images, documents, spreadsheets, PDFs and more
  • Stack files according to crucial attributes, such as date and tags
  • Drag a file out of a Stack and drop it into a document, or vice versa
  • Easily scrub through all of the data in a stack

Best of all: Stacks are organized automatically. And when you add a new file to your desktop, that’s also automatically listed under the appropriate stack.

Note: Folders are not grouped into stacks; only files are.

How to use stacks on Mac

To get started with macOS stacks, you’ll need to activate the tool.

1) From the Mac desktop, select View > Use Stacks from the Finder menu. You can also right-click or Control-click on the desktop wallpaper and choose Use Stacks.

Activate Stacks on Mac from top menu bar

2) Instantly, your desktop files are organized into stacks.

  • Here’s how it looked before:
How Mac desktop looks before activating Stacks
  • And here’s how it looks now:
How Mac desktop looks after activating Stacks

3) Click on a Stack to see the contents inside.

In this example, you can see the files in the Images stack:

Stacks Images

4) Don’t like stacks? You can unselect Use Stacks from the Finder View menu.

Customize the stacks

To see grouping options for each stack:

1) Right-click on the desktop and select Group Stacks By from the popup menu. You can also find this under your toolbar under View > Group Stacks By. Choices include:

  • None: Do not group any items within stacks
  • Kind: Group items within stacks by file type
  • Date Last Opened: Group files within stacks by the time you last opened them
  • Date Added: Group files within stacks by the date they were added
  • Date Modified: Group files within stacks based on the date they were last modified
  • Date Created: Group files within stacks according to their creation date
  • Tags: Group files within stacks based on the tags you’ve assigned
Group Stacks by on Mac

In the example below, the Images folder above went from being organized by Date Added to Date Created.

Stacks by Date Created on Mac

Stacks support other actions, including:

  • See the contents of a stack: Click a stack to expand it and see what’s inside
  • Collapse a stack: Click its down-facing arrow, and the expanded stack will minimize back in a group
  • Browse a stack: Swipe left or right on the stack with two fingers on the trackpad to see what’s within. If you’re using the Magic Mouse, swipe with one finger
  • Drag and drop: Click a stack to unfurl it, then drag a file and drop it into another app
  • Quickly import files: Scrub over a stack to select a file, then drag it into another app

Change how the stacks look

If you click View > Show View Options from the Finder menu bar or right-click on the desktop and choose Show View Options, you can customize the icon size, grid spacing, and more. These settings affect the items on your desktop, including stacks.

Related: How to set the default view and sort order for a folder on Mac

Real-life uses and benefits

Why should you use stacks in macOS? To make you more organized, of course.

For example, thanks to stacks, you can now organize your files based on specific time periods. This could prove useful when trying to organize projects for billing purposes.

Conversely, adding Tags to your documents allows you to organize files by job or purpose. In the example below, images have been arranged by quality, either Excellent, Good, or Bad:

Stacks by tags

With desktop stacks, you can organize your desktop in fun and useful ways. Best of all, because Apple includes so many customization tools with stacks, you can find the way that’s ideally suited for you. In other words, there’s no wrong way to organize your files on Mac.

Check out next: How to set your Mac’s Finder to show folder sizes