Smart Folders - Remember folder settings?

Is it possible to make Smart Folders remember the folder settings? (folder size, width of columns etc.)
In Tiger if I altered the folder size (drag the bottom right corner) & a column width (e.g. Name or Last Opened) it would be the same next time I opened it.
But in Leopard it always reverts back to the original small size where file name are cut off.

Sorry about that. I just assumed that the SmartFolder would respond like a normal folder. As you know it doesn't because it is really a database query document.
There is a possibility of you being able to create the equivalent of the SmartFolder query using the Find suite of actions in the Spotlight library and then pass the result to the Copy action.
If not then this is a workaround based on directly using the SmartFolder document.
1) Find Finder Items - specify your Smart Folder
2) Open Finder Items - Default Application
3) Run AppleScript - copy the AppleScript given below from the Script Editor into this action where it says (* Your script goes here *)
4) Get Selected Finder Items
5) Copy Finder Items - specify where you want to copy them to
click here to open this script in your editor<pre style="font-family: 'Monaco', 'Courier New', Courier, monospace; overflow:auto; color: #222; background: #DDD; padding: 0.2em; font-size: 10px; width:400px">tell application "System Events"
tell process "Finder"
set frontmost to true
click menu item "Select All" of menu 1 of menu bar item "Edit" of menu bar 1
end tell
end tell
</pre>
PowerBook 12" Mac OS X (10.4.8)

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Mail and Smart Folders losing column show and hide settings - a fix?

Lately I switched my mail to be hosted by google and so in order for my in and out boxes to contain my current and older messages, I have each set as Smart Folders. It's this difference that I think might be making this bug worse.
Previous to this change I'd noticed Mail forgets which columns I have shown and what order they're in between quitting and relaunching.. but now with the smart folders, the column settings will be lost when I'm merely not paying attention to Mail (when it's hidden or in the background).
This is particularly irritating since I always use Mail with two view windows, one showing my inbox and the other showing my sent messages. What seems to be happening most is that if I have my inbox showing From and To, that setting will bleed over to the sent window.. showing me that all my sent messages are, of course, From me. I hide that column and later on it comes back by itself. Either that, or I hide the From column in Sent and later on I lose the From column in the Inbox.

Hobyx,
Wow this thread really is a little stale. Sorry about that. What it sounds like to me is the preferences file is going bad, you could try removing com.apple.mail.plist. Found in Macintosh HD -> Users -> YOUR USERS -> Library -> Preferences. Please note that you will have to add your Gmail account back in. But any emails/smart folders on your Mac wont be removed by deleting that plist.
Also On the Gmail side you will get significant better results if you select the corresponding folder in your gmail account 'Found in the sidebar' and select Mailbox -> Use this Mailbox for -> and select what your using for. Whilst using the imap setup.
Hope that helps,
Weston

I have just recently bought a MacBook Air. I am looking for an email which I put into a folder on my Mac Pro. The smart folders have come across to the Air, but not the 'On my Mac' folders. Are they lost?

I have just recently bought a MacBook Air. I am looking for an email which I put into a folder on my Mac Pro. The smart folders have come across to the Air, but not the 'On my Mac' folders. Are they lost?

Are you sure that the "On My Mac" folders weren't empty? If all your mail accounts are IMAP, they may have been.

Why can't I use smart folders/searches on ANY random folder?

I am trying to do what I thought was a simple operation with Smart Folders, but it turns out it isn't.
I want to use a smart folder on ANY folder, and not just one specific folder.
For instance, let's say I want to find out which files in any folder I happen to choose consists of audio files that are either mono or stereo. This is easy to do if I just set the smart folder to search the entire disk, or one, specfic folder, but for some reason I can't just use the smart folder on ANY random folder I happen to choose.
Is there any workaround? Or any other way to do this?

Non authoritative answer: Only IE and Bing Toolbar versions are available. Did Microsoft decide to fund development strictly for their browsers?

Organize Safari Download Folder (Smart Folders)

Alright, I have been organizing my computer and I was wondering if there was a way to organize my download folder with smart folders. If a song I download or place into my download folder, I want to be automatically organized into this smart folder labeled, "Music." Is this possible? But I don't want to include all my music located on my hard drive. Just the music located in my Download Folder.

Open the downloads folder in Finder
choose File-Find (Command F)
where it says 'search' at the top, select 'downloads' rather than 'this mac'
Set the 'kind' to 'music'
hit the save button & save it inside the downloads folder (or anywhere), with whatever name you choose.

How to auto-restore Smart Folders on the dock after reboot?

So I've created a smart folder that basically gathers all the applications that I use with the Adobe Creative Suite (i.e. Photoshop, Illustrator, InDesign, etc.). For quick access, I drag the smart folder to the dock and I change the sort method to NAME and the view to LIST. And here's what I get as a result, which works very nicely:
http://imgur.com/EWUgm6w
The problem is, after I restrat my Mac, that smart folder on the dock gets completely messed up (the folder icon is changed and nothing pops up when I click on the icon) so I have to then delete the one that's on the dock, drag a new copy out and then change the sort and view methods to my preferences all over again. I was a bit surprised the first time I noticed this but after seeing the smart folder get messed after multiple restarts, I realized that there's something wrong.
My assumption is that the smart folder gets reprocessed on a reboot and though the original location where the smart folder is stored is fine when I go look at it, the shortcut that I place on the dock loses its functionality altogether.
I'm wondering if anyone has run into this on their end and found a good solution? If there was a script I could run when the computer started to automate the tasks that I have to do (remove old folder from dock, copy new one, change sort & view methods), that would be great -- but I don't know how to do this! Alternatively, if there's another way to achieve this pop up list without creating a folder manually and dragging 10 shortcuts into the folder, that would be great. I like the idea of keeping the list dynamic (hence the smart folders method) so that if anything changes, the updates would be reflected autmatically in the folder.

I have the same issue. Upon restarting, my two smart folders get a drawer-looking icon and don't function. I am able to right click to change settings, but nothing seems to get them to actually work.

Column view not peristent in mail smart folders

I use a smart folder which displays multiple actual folders; I enable the mailbox column, but as soon as I move to another folder and back, the column becomes disabled.
I assume from some other old messages that this is the intended default behavior and not a bug. Does anyone know whether there is a way to ensure persistent column settings, and if not, if this is a planned fix for the next version of mail.app?
Thanks very much.
(searching: persistent column views in mail; View > Columns > Mailbox)

I'd love to know too, but can't seem to find out how.
This seems like a major oversight/quirk.
I have to adjust the column widths often -- otherwise they bounce back.
I have this in the Inbox, not just Smart Folders.

My smart folders aren't so smart anymore

I have installed Leopard and my mail program works fine except that all of my smart folders are empty. I have checked the folder settings and they are the same as before, and I know the emails are in there but for some reason the smart folders are not gathering them up.

I had exactly the same problem. I found that I had an inactive mail account configured. I deleted that account and it started working again. I'm not sure if it was because I had two mailboxes, or because I had one inactive. Can you guys try that out? Maybe it is because of an inactive account?
OK that worked once, but when I closed and reopened the "smart" mailbox, it disappeared again.
Message was edited by: Bud Lande

Yosemite: Can't create smart folders at all

Through all the Yosemite Betas, up to and including the 10.10.2 release, I'm unable to create smart folders - either through searching for files in Finder and using the "Save" button, or using opt-cmd-N to create a new smart folder.
The "Save" button does absolutely nothing if pressed.

Just to clarify, Photoshop CC has not been released yet. It will come out on June 17.
What you have now is Photoshop 13.x as per the subscription model (»Abo«) and it's called Photoshop CS6. When Photoshop 14.x is released on June 17, then it will be called "CC".
It's not clear—at least to me—which images, if any, you have selected in Bridge when you hit the »Speichern« (Save) button.
Remember that a Collection is nothing more than a saved search, i.e. a saved collection of selected search results (hits).
Could you elaborate on what it is you want to save as a collection?
Incidentally, the Adobe Bridge forum is here:
http://forums.adobe.com/community/bridge?view=discussions

Virtual (Smart?) Application Folder

I know there are three preferred locations for applications to reside: /Network/Applications (network apps), /Applications (system apps), and ~/Applications (user apps). By default, my Dock's "Application" folder is just a link to /Applications and thus just shows the system apps. Is it possible to create a virtual folder which displays the combined contents of all three application folders, rather than having to access them separately? This way, the user doesn't have to remember which folder contains a specific application.
Thus far, I have made a Smart Folder and customized its property list (by editing the raw .savedSearch file) to search the above three directories. However, this recursively searches all subpaths, so all apps in /Applications/Utilities appear at the top-level of the Smart Folder. Ideally, this wouldn't happen, and the Smart Folder would basically be a copy of the root-level contents of the application folders. Here's a concrete example of what I'm looking for:
/Applications:
App Store.app
Automator.app
Utilities/
/Network/Applications:
Firefox.app
~/Applications:
Eclipse.app
Fetch.app
Virtual Application Folder:
App Store.app*
Automator.app*
Eclipse.app*
Fetch.app*
Firefox.app*
Utilities/*
* where all these guys are aliases or symlinks.
Is this possible with Smart Folders? If not, is there another virtual folder abstraction available that can handle the job?

Thanks for the response, Barney. Yes, on a typical system, /Applications is for all users and ~/Applications is user-specific. I was trying to indicate that, in a networked environment, /Applications is for all users on a particular system, rather than all users on the network. The discussion can be restricted to just /Applications and ~/Applications, though, since any solution should easily be able to add /Network/Applications to the list of search paths. Also, I just picked the locations for Firefox, Fetch, etc. arbitrarily.
Ideally, I'd like something that transparently updates when any of the Applications folders is modified. In other words, if I add something to /Applications, it shows up in the virtual folder immediately. Manually creating aliases or symlinks isn't going to achieve that. I could easily write a script to regenerate the folder on modification, but I don't know how to invoke it when any of the sources are modified.
Also, since I doubt I can have my cake and eat it too, it's ok to have a smart folder which opens in Finder, rather than presenting the items via the Dock. Bonus points to circumventing this, though.

Sync a BlackBerry Remember Folder AFTER it's been created

I can imagine in the urgency of planning a BB "LACKberry" 10 native app IN THE EARLY DAYS (in truth, not too long ago) with designated people planning the roadmap of an app native to the upcoming BB 10, yet the with pressure from the higher-ups to CRANK SOMETHING OUT QUICKLY:
SCENARIO HYPOTHETICAL:
AMAZING THAT PEOPLE, SITTING IN LITTLE OFFICES CONFIGURING A NATIVE BB 10 APP WITHOUT THINKING OUTSIDE OF THE BOX. That is to say, that I can envision a bunch of people coming in with their coffee early in the morning way back when the pressure was on to "get something out there quickly to integrate in the new BB10" and no one thinking that if, in the creation of this new BB Remember App, that if you're going to make it native and a power app in relation to other parts of the BB 10 OS body SO CONSUMERS WOULD NOT LOOK ELSEWHERE (say in BB App World) for a memo/task/productivity app), that ANY AND ALL OPTIONS would be insisted upon for the convenience and high power user.
BUT, SUCH WAS NOT THE CASE HERE, as I have delved DEEP AS POSSIBLE into the all options that BB Remember does and "what it could do", yet BEREFT how limited this app really is in every sense of the word. Does anyone get tired of recommending apps outside of native BB apps when BlackBerry should be all inclusive so that the natural tendency is to not look elsewhere? To those who have BlackBerry in their blood, who wish not to look in app world all the time and want to be an all-BlackBerry-only con/pro-sumer, it is just sad...
"The Dilemma":
I'm finding it impossible to take an existing BlackBerry Remember Folder and edit it to "Sync". By default in 10.1 (Since AT&T is always last at giving an official update), I've 20 folders. When I click on edit, to edit for example, the name of the folder and color (Can't believe how limited these color choices are), if you pull down further my "Sync To" is grayed out.
Is there any way to change this? What this means that ONLY at the start of creating a new folder (Infancy stage of creation of a Remember Folder and color) can you use the pull down as to whether or not the folder is going to sync, in this case, my only available option is Evernote when there should be a SLEW OF SYNC OPTIONS.
Critical thought: But any existing ones I cannot edit to sync with anything "after" the fact. Maybe I am doing something wrong, but there's not a whole lot of use here as in BBOS was with my 4,780 memos and tasks that were perfectly synced together. In the twenty folders now with over 3,600 current entries, I am not going to create a "new" folder and jam them all into one and not have them segregated into folder sections just for the sake of syncing when they should sync 'at will' from and at any time and to any cloud service I choose or locally on the BB 10 device as well, e.g., "the media card"...
Just crazy. No thought-arresting sense, mitigating the love and passion that each native app should be planned for inside of the blood and veins of a BB device, so that people NEVER,....NEVER, look elsewhere...
Yes, I own a LACKberry... Z10

I thought I was the only user having probs with the BB Remember app., it rarely features in the forums and as yet I've had no helpful replies. My prob is that since upgrading to 10.2.0.424 the facility to order by due date does nothing, the tasks simply remain in alphabetical order. The help video shows a button to enable a due date, I don't have this but I am able to add a due date - just wont show tasks in due date order, although it will order by last am ended date or created date! Any help/ suggestions appreciated.

Smart folders seems not to work with star rating. Is there a fix?

I Rate photos with a five star rating either on iPhoto or Adobe Bridge CS5. When I create a smart folder setting the search attribute to "Rating equals 5" nothing appears on the search.

Sorry,
I think I misunderstood your question. You were talking about smart folders in the Finder and not about smart albums in iPhoto, right? "Rating equals 5" does not work on any of my machines, neither in Snow leopard nor in Lion. The problem seems to be how to represent the rating in the search string. If I search for "Rating is not 5" the smart folder contains plenty of pictures, also those with a rating of five. Does anyone know how the rating is coded to be used in a search string in the Finder?

Major change to how smart folders work?

I'm an ex-PC user and one way I configured the finder to work more like how I was used to working was to color code all my folders red and the half-dozen files I work with on a daily basis green. I had smart folders for both in the Tiger sidebar and they were there all the time. In Leopard they are only there in a finder window and are in the search for area. When I am in a program and want to open a file, that search for section is no longer in the sidebar, so I have to drill down through all folders and sub-folders to find the file I want. Am I going to be limited to launching files directly from the smart folder to easily find the files I need and not open from within the application?
RR

By default when you make a Smart Folder and save it you get it saved into this folder:
"/Users/yourname/Library/Saved Searches"
If you open that folder you should see your Smart Folders. Drag them into the "Places" section of the Sidebar in your open Finder window. They will now show up in the Open dialog window of your application. Of course, you will have them listed twice in the normal Finder window: once in places, so you can see them in the Open window, and once in Search For. Jeez, don't the programmers ever have to talk to each other? Anyway, the sensible thing to do is to have other sorts of things, that you don't need access to from an application, in the Search For section--or just close that section up. This is definitely another "what were they thinking" moment.
Francine
Francine
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List view status of flagged messages in Yosemite Mail Smart Folders

I'm using Mail in Yosemite with an Exchange server. Before Yosemite, everything was fine, now I have an issue with message flag status in Smart Folders. I have a Smart Folder which is my "ongoing" mail folder; it is set to only show unread and/or flagged messages. In the latest version of Mail, setting the messages flagged status does not change the flag icon in the message list, but does in the header of the actual mail message. The only way to get the flag to show up in the list is to select another folder and then reselect the smart folder. It does this on both my MacBook Pro and iMac, with with the latest Yosemite version and all updates applied.
In the previous OS X Mail (Mavericks) changing the flag status would remove/add the flag icon in the message list pane; now it doesn't. It's insanely annoying.
Anyone else seen this bug? I have tried recreating the smart folder and that makes no difference, neither has rebuilding the mailbox/deleting index/envelope file. No changes have been made to our Exchange server.
Cheers
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Well, I guess those are more "smart inboxes" and not "smart mailboxes" in iOS...

Smart folders not working...

I've got some smart folders that just stopped working... I haven't changed the definitions and they were working fine, but all of a sudden they are not.
The one that is not working is defined with 3 things, one of them is another smart filter. This has always worked in the past.
I booted the machine, and inso doing went in and out of mail. Is there anything to reset?
thanks...

I found a work around... but I'm still curious why this stopped working...
The original logic was to have a sort of pre-filter Smart Mailbox with tons of conditions with "Any" selected. Then the second folder had "All" selected with "In the pre-filter mailbox" and "in the inbox selected". This stopped working and I had to then change it to "In the pre-filter mailbox" and "not in the specific folder I later sort into" This isn't quite as useful since sometimes I sort into different folders, but it did work.
I'm on 10.4.10 on a PPC iMac G5 1GB DDR2 SDRAM... I've done all the updates Apple can put out here except the iPod stuff since I'm not in that world... yet.

Smart Folders - Remember folder settings?

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