The Finder location
- The Storage Studio location in Finder
Storage Studio adds a Storage Studio entry under Locations in Finder's sidebar, with a folder for each connected cloud account, your external drive's Home folder and your paired devices. Files download only when you open them.
- Keep opened files on this Mac
Keep opened files on this Mac sets how long a file you opened from the Storage Studio location stays downloaded once you stop using it, before it goes back to online-only and its space is freed. The default is 24 hours.
- Large folders appear a page at a time
In the Storage Studio location, a big folder is handed to Finder in pages rather than all at once, and a folder you've opened before appears straight away from its saved listing while a fresh one is fetched in the background.
- Thumbnails, and why some accounts show plain icons
The Storage Studio location shows picture, video and document thumbnails on accounts where reading a little of a file costs nothing. On storage that charges for each request it shows plain icons, so browsing never runs up a bill.
- Why Google Photos isn't in the Finder location
A connected Google Photos account doesn't appear in the Storage Studio location in Finder, because Google only lets apps see photos that the app itself uploaded. It still works as a transfer destination, and Google Takeout is the way to get your whole library.
- The Finder button in the main window
The Finder icon next to the tabs at the top of the main window opens the Storage Studio location in Finder in one click. It shows a spinner while the drive is getting ready and is greyed out while the location is turned off.
- When the location falls back to a mounted drive
If the Storage Studio location can't start in Finder, Storage Studio mounts a fallback drive with the same folders so your files stay reachable. It isn't in Finder's sidebar, so use Open the Drive or the Finder button to reach it.
- The Home folder in the Finder location
Home in the Storage Studio location is your external drive's Storage Studio folder. You can browse all of it, but the folders that hold your moved apps, offloaded apps and Storage Studio's own files are read-only, so they can't be broken by accident.