I have some pictures and videos on my Mac (OS X Lion, OS X Snow Leopard) I'd rather have NOT show in Finder>Images. For example, if I'm in a meeting with clients and want to show some document, I have to fire up Finder and open said document, and when I click towards that, those pictures/movies show up and embarrass me. Think hmmm, strategic company workflows ahemf.
Is it possible to tell Finder to NEVER show these?
MacOS – How to exclude the display of specific pictures and videos in the Finder
findermacossnow leopard
Related Solutions
tl;dr - It's safe to delete in whatever way you choose.
The only conceivable problem would be if Time Machine was trying to prune a backup at the same time you were deleting, so maybe turn off Time Machine for the duration of your clean up if you're not using the built in delete button.
You can use tmutil delete in Lion to safely delete backups. The benefit of this is the deletion happens more silently in the background. The downside is the UI isn't speedy for deleting more than one snapshot at a time. In practice, you have to be there to attend multiple deletions.
Don't worry about the internals of how files are linked or stored - yes most of the files in most of the backups are hard links, but to clean these up, you have to delete things folder by folder. The system will handle decrementing the link count so there's no better or worse way to go here.
It is also safe to simply remove them via Finder or any other method - just be patient as each backup contains a full set of directory entries for each file. My (worst) record is 4 days to delete through finder a batch of unwanted backups.
Good advice might be to start small if you can't leave your mac on overnight.
You won't lose any data unless you are deleting the last copy of a version of some file. You don't get any warnings, it will get deleted - this is the same whether you use Time Machine itself, or Finder or rm in some terminal script.
As a brief aside - Why do you want to do this? Time Machine automatically prunes old backups when you're getting low on space. I've found it very comforting to just clone my Time Machine drive to a cheap USB external drive and put it on the shelf. (or make this the drive on the shelf and use it as an excuse to get a new drive) Perhaps it's the perfect pack-rat-keep-everything verses if-you-don't-need-it-now's-the-time-to-delete-it test for Mac users.
If a file is opened with Terminal, and has the execute bit set, then Terminal will execute it.
Get Info on a .sh file and set it to be opened with Terminal, and click the Change All button.
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Best Answer
I am unsure if you are asking how to exclude folders from showing up in your finder spotlight search, or if what you are after is to hide specific folders from being shown in a finder window.
If you are after excluding folders from a spotlight search, you can do this in the privacy tab from system preferences / spotlight :
If you are after having the ability to show or hide files and folders from being viewed while you are in a finder window, then you can create an automator service to do just that :
hints.macworld.com/article.php?story=20100719001040829
NOTE : the tip above only toggles all files that have the hidden flag set, so if you need to quickly mark a folder or a file as "hidden", then you need to set this bit attribute for that file or folder.
An easy way to do this is via a free utility software download that does just this here (used to be shareware, but now free ) : gotoes.org/ShowHiddenFilesMacOSX/
NOTE 2 :
If you are happy using the terminal command line, you can just type the following on the terminal :
or
Hope this helps.