Hide Desktop Icons on Mac: A Simple Guide

Decluttering Your Mac Desktop: Hiding External Drive Icons

A crowded desktop with numerous icons can be visually distracting. Mac OS X has historically displayed icons for removable drives by default. Fortunately, these icons can be easily disabled through the system preferences.

Accessing Finder Preferences

Begin by navigating to the menu bar and opening the Finder Preferences. Within the preferences window, locate the section labeled "Show these items on the desktop".

The option controlling external drive icons is specifically designated as "External disks". It’s important to remember that disk image (.DMG) files are also recognized as external disks by the system.

Simply uncheck this box to remove the icons from your desktop.

Accessing Drives After Hiding Icons

Despite the icons disappearing, your external disks and other devices remain fully accessible. You can locate them within the Finder application.

Navigate to the Finder sidebar to view a comprehensive list of connected devices.

A Note on Drive Speed

Recently, a new external USB3 solid state drive was acquired from LaCie. The performance of this drive is exceptionally fast.

This solid state drive offers significantly improved data transfer speeds.