If you use your Mac for daily work, your desktop can quickly become a chaotic dumping ground. Screenshots, downloaded PDF invoices, project folders, and random text files often pile up until your beautiful desktop wallpaper is completely obscured by hundreds of overlapping icons.
Instead of spending an hour manually sorting every individual file into specific folders, macOS includes a brilliant, automated organization feature called Stacks. With a single click, Stacks instantly gathers all the clutter on your desktop and organizes it into neat, categorized piles.
How to Enable Desktop Stacks
Activating Stacks is completely effortless and requires zero manual configuration.
- Ensure Finder is active (click the smiling Mac face icon in your dock, or click anywhere on the empty desktop).
- Look at the menu bar at the absolute top of your screen and click on View.
- In the drop-down menu, click on Use Stacks.
Instantly, every single file on your desktop will fly across the screen and collapse into distinct, organized piles on the right side of your monitor.
By default, macOS organizes these stacks by File Kind. You will see one stack dedicated entirely to “Screenshots,” one for “Documents,” one for “Images,” and one for “PDF Documents.” (Note: Stacks only organizes files. Any actual Folders on your desktop will remain separate and untouched).
How to Interact with a Stack
You do not need to open a separate Finder window to view the contents of a stack.
If you click once on a stack (for example, the “Images” stack), the pile will instantly expand, elegantly spreading all of the individual image files back across your desktop so you can see them.
You can then drag a specific image into an email, open it in Photoshop, or delete it. When you are finished, click the original “Images” stack icon (which now looks like a folder with a down arrow) to collapse the pile back into its neat, organized state.
How to Change How Stacks Are Sorted
While sorting by “Kind” is the default behavior, it might not suit your specific workflow. If you are working on a massive project and need to find a file you downloaded yesterday, organizing by date is much more efficient.
- Right-click (or Control-click) anywhere on the empty space of your desktop.
- Hover your mouse over the Group Stacks By option in the menu.
- A sub-menu will appear. You can choose to organize your stacks by:
- Date Last Opened: Perfect for finding files you were just working on.
- Date Added: Groups files into “Today,” “Yesterday,” “Previous 7 Days,” etc.
- Date Modified: Sorts by when the file was last edited.
- Tags: If you use macOS color tags (Red for Urgent, Green for Complete), Stacks will automatically pile files based on their color assignment.
The moment you select a new grouping method, the stacks will instantly reorganize themselves across your screen.
How to Turn Stacks Off
If you decide you hate the Stacks feature and want your messy desktop back, reversing the process is simple.
Just right-click on the desktop, and uncheck the Use Stacks option. All your files will immediately scatter back to the exact physical locations they were in before you turned the feature on.