I would like to use the shift+click selection method on windows within the Finder that are using icon view. Unfortunately, whilst it works fine in the other views to block highlight all files between the first and second click, its behaviour changes to operate the same as cmd+click in icon view.
I have a few hundred images in the folder and I want to select a big range to move it to a separate folder. The range is higher than my screen, so it needs be scrolled down – to a point. This is one of the most frequent situations in dealing with images. I don't know which images are which just by their filenames. I need to see them to select them. I don't want to drag the mouse/trackpad to select the range, as I need to be extra cautious about the scroll speed that way. It's infinitely more convenient to use the Apple's all-glorified trackpad (two-finger scrolling) that admittedly does work great. Then, when I find the last picture, I want to shift-click it and have the range selected.
Is there any way to get this working in icon view, or can anyone at least attempt to explain why it does not work, and if it's perhaps a bug or maybe a conscious decision to implement it in this way?
Best Answer
They didn't "take that feature away"; OS X has never had it. Obviously, we can't know exactly why OS X doesn't have it, so your question cannot be definitively answered in the way you insist upon. But here's my hypothesis:
Finder items in Icon View don't always have an obvious order the way they do always do in List View. They start being arranged in rows by whatever you have it set to arrange by, but you can then drag icons to any position, and that position will be (in theory) remembered forever. If your icons are haphazardly arranged, how is OS X to divine which items are "between" any given two items?
They could come up with some algorithm, but given that your icons could be scattered amongst arbitrary pixel-granular coordinates, there would undoubtedly be cases where it didn't do the thing you thought you wanted. For that matter, also unlike List View, items in Icon View can be located outside the viewable bounds of the Finder window on both axes, and shift-click range selecting would then sometimes select icons you can't see and had no idea were being selected.
So, if anything, what you "gain" by this behavior is an assurance against accidentally moving/copying/trashing your files without expecting or knowing it.