Accessing SFTP site with iMac

Hello everyone,

I still cannot, for the life of me, understand why Apple refuses to at least allow us to turn on/off FTP WRITE access from the macOS Finder. The system is perfectly capable of doing it (you can do it via Terminal through Unix). I’ve posted on this several times in years past and just sent another feedback message on macOS regarding this. My feedback (I hope others agree it would be nice to see this included within macOS Finder)…

I’m still dumbfounded as to why my Mac does NOT support anything other than read-only access to FTP servers. I am surprised and disappointed to find this most common of connectivity features to be so lacking.

Does Apple intend to implement/correct this glaring omission in an update? Without having read/WRITE access built into our macOS system (as Windows has had for years), those of us on a Mac who must utilize FTP for other web servers requiring it are forced to use 3rd party apps. To me, this really is unnecessary and unacceptable. Please allow WRITE access to FTP via the macOS Finder. PLEASE.

If you agree this would be a great addition to our beloved macOS, please be sure to submit your feedback to Apple. Hopefully we can get enough people to request it so it gets attention. https://www.apple.com/feedback/macos.html

You need an sftp client. Cyberduck is a popular example:

https://cyberduck.io/

but there are others.

C.

DrMicah78 wrote:

Do I need to install additional software to access an SFTP site?

No, not really. Finder already has a FTP client built in.

Open Finder from the dock:

Click on the "Go" menu at the top, and select Connect to Server

In the window that comes up, type in:

ftps://address_of_ftp_server

and click "Connect".

Provide the correct credentials when asked. The folders and files available will appear in the Finder Window.

http://osxdaily.com/2011/02/07/ftp-from-mac/

Having revisited this sort of scenario today after some time, I discovered that accessing an FTP server through Finder gave me no write-access.

Another popular example SFTP client from the days of yore is Fugu, which can be downloaded from SourceForge here.

This is true, the FTP connections with Finder are "Read Only" which works for "accessing" files on the FTP server, but not for uploading.

For upload features, a 3rd party FTP client is required.

I personally like Filezilla. but there are others.

https://filezilla-project.org/download.php

If you don't need write access, then Finder will work to simply download the file.

For a secure connection use the "ftps://" prefix.

I like Forklift -> http://www.binarynights.com/forklift/

Fetch is good also -> http://fetchsoftworks.com/fetch/