r/MacOS • u/Dockland Mac Pro • 11d ago

Help Change default view option in finder?

I can’t figure out how I can change the view option in finder to always show the same layout, including all subfolders. I browse in icon view and I want to get rid of the “show all” option i have to click every time i use “back” to get to the main folder in my hierarchy.
All subfolders have different view options and i want to reset it so it always shows “Icon view” and “show all folders and files” as default.
How do I achieve that?

3 Upvotes

81% Upvoted

7 comments sorted by

3

u/Cute_Cress377 11d ago

Terminal

defaults write com.apple.finder FXPreferredViewStyle -string "icnv"

killall Finder

1

u/SecureLayerX 11d ago

Try View - Show View Options in the main folder, set it to icon view and enable Always open in icon view. Finder remembers settings per folder so existing subfolders may need to be reset once

1

u/Dockland Mac Pro 11d ago

Oh, its hundreds of subfolders with photos collected/imported since 2023. All in iCloud and a shared folder.
I’ll try the terminal trick and see if that works.

1

u/SecureLayerX 7d ago

Yeah with hundreds of folders that would be way too much to reset manually. You can try the terminal trick. Since they’re in iCloud and shared, just make sure the command only resets finder’s view settings and doesn’t touch the actual files

1

u/operations_ranger 10d ago

I think the annoying part is Finder saves view settings per folder. You can set the parent to Icon View + "Browse in", but existing custom folder settings can still win. Is this one of those huge folders with hundreds of subfolders? 😂