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Change "Recent Places" to more than 5 items?

I really like the "recent places" dialog box when saving items across applications. But I wish I could see more than five items in the list.


Is there a way to change it to 10 or 15 places?

iMac, OS X Mountain Lion (10.8.4), MacBook Air, iPhone5

Posted on Jul 22, 2013 6:59 AM

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13 replies

Jul 22, 2013 1:12 PM in response to bythecshore

The recent places referred to is located on the folder selector in the Save/Save As... dialog.


There is a system setting for this in GlobalPreferences called NSNavRecentPlaces. You can see this from the Terminal as:

defaults find recentplaces

In Leopard and Snow Leopard, one could issue the following command to increase the recent places array -- and it would take effect immediately.

defaults write .GlobalPreferences NSNavRecentPlacesLimit -int 10

When I ran this on my 10.8.4 system, the command returned without error. Xcode showed the resource and value written in the .GlobalPreferences file, as did the above defaults find command. However, even after a reboot, there was no change. Still stuck at five recent places entries. The other notable was that the recent places locations were not changing after several Save/Save As... cycles --- deliberately to new destinations.


So, unless anyone else has additional tweaks, you may have to settle for five entries, and hopefully for you, they do change.


Here is the reference article.

Apr 17, 2015 7:43 AM in response to DavidM3

DavidM3, any luck?


Wondered if you ever found a solution to this, or if anyone can direct me to a thread revolving around this conversation in particular?


I've been searching for an answer to this functionality for months with no avail, and with not being able to find anyone even asking the same questions as me. I like that you are able to expand the recent places drop down with the aforementioned Terminal command, but that's only in the Save As / Open dialogs. I'm interested in that same functionality for a basic Finder window (not within an application). What's interesting is that in the image below, you can see that Apple has included a feature similar to what we want, but only contains the breadcrumb trail to what folder we are in currently. As you know, that is what composes the top half of any drop down menu in Save As / Open dialog windows. But the bottom half is recent folder locations, including network (server) AND local folders. This is crucial and would be a super speedy improvement to my workflow. I know people say to use Smart Folders/ Smart Searches but that doesn't include network locations—only local.


If anyone has any knowledge of how to maybe get a Finder hack or 3rd party app to create this functionality, I would be eternally grateful! Maybe this is a feature I could request of the noble people behind the app XtraFinder (a great little app for those looking for expanded Finder functionality).


User uploaded file

Change "Recent Places" to more than 5 items?

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