Mac OS X has a useful feature that can be described as “icon captions”, that shows you information about each item on your desktop. Icon captions show you things like maximum and used capacity for storage volumes, file counts for folders, and dimensions for images. To enable these icon captions, hold CTRL and click on your desktop (if you have an Apple Mighty Mouse, right-click on your desktop). In the context menu that pops up, click on “Show View Options”. The following menu will appear:
Check off the box next to “Show Item Info”, and you’ll see captions appear under each of the icons on your desktop. Here’s the Macintosh HD icon without a caption:
Now, here’s the Macintosh HD icon with a caption showing its storage capacity (and how much of that capacity is consumed):
Here’s an image icon, which now has a caption that shows us the dimensions of the image.
And finally, here’s a folder icon that now has a caption displaying the number of files that it contains.
