creating desktop shortcut from Finder sidebar (and vice versa)

Hotwheels22 wrote:
can anyone help me with creating desktop shortcut icons from Finder sidebar icons as well as how to add shortcut icons to the Finder sidebar?

I'm not exactly sure what you mean by "desktop shortcut icons". Do you mean aliases (the Mac term) on the Desktop?

Adding things to the Finder sidebar is easy. Just drag a thing to the sidebar. To create an alias on the Desktop of something in the sidebar, click on the sidebar item, then hold down a command and an option key while you drag the folder "badge" at the top of the Finder window next to the folder name to the Desktop. As the mouse pointer reaches the Desktop, it will change to a curved arrow, representing that an alias will be created.

Hotwheels22 wrote:
Can you help me with this item of holding down the command and option key while you drag the folder "'badge'". What is this badge?

In a Finder window there will be the title of the open folder at the top of the window. This will be in line with the red, yellow, and green buttons in the left corner. Just to the left of the window title will be a small "badge" icon. For a folder it will resemble a folder. For a volume it will resemble the icon of the volume. This icon is what you want to drag onto the Desktop (or wherever else you want it) while you hold down a "command" key and an "option" key.

For instance, I see my Time Capsule showing up in Shared and I would like to make an Alias of it on the desktop. I have tried previously to select this icon, hold down CMD + Option, Option, CMD etc and drag it to the desktop.

You need to first click on the icon in the sidebar. That should cause that item to open in the Finder window and the title to change to what you've opened. Then try the drag.

Also, thanks on clarifying the adding to the sidebar. I got confused when it wanted to delete them when I drag them to the desktop.

I couldn't find any way to drag a Finder sidebar item without causing it to be removed from the sidebar. The drag technique only seems to work on a sidebar item if you first open the location of the item.

if this is the same procedure for creating an alias for a folder that shows up somewhere in a Finder window? For instance, I run a search in Spotlight, want to add an alias to one of the results on my Desktop.

It doesn't seem possible to drag to create an alias of an item in the initial Spotlight window, the one below the Spotlight menu bar item. However, if you select "Show All" (the first item in the Spotlight list), you can then do a command-option drag to create an alias, the same way command-option drag creates an alias of anything in a Finder window.

Hotwheels22 wrote:
Say I want to put an alias for a file on the desktop? I see I have CopyPath loaded into my Finder Pane but is this something different? CopyPath literally copies the path of a file or folder for pasting is that right?

I have no experience with CopyPath, but it appears that all it does it copy the full path of a file to the paste buffer. It seems to me that there are limited situations where you would want such a thing. In particular, you wouldn't do that in the process of creating an alias.

In any event, can you give me some words of experience on how to get aliases for files working?

They should work similarly to folder aliases, except that there's no "badge" to command-option-drag. Besides that drag technique, there's also the Finder menu item File -> Make Alias (command-L). That creates an alias with a name that ends in "alias", which I'm inclined to edit out after moving it to another location. One the other hand, some people would prefer that to trying to remember command-option-drag.

Also, do you happen to know if there are any tricks or traps to creating aliases for network drives? I assume this operation is simply the same as that for folders, yes?

Although I don't normally do that, I would suppose it would be similar to folders. I've seen discussions of sidebar items of unmounted volumes disappearing, I wouldn't expect volume aliases to behave the same way.