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How to find your Mac's Home folder (and add it to Finder)

You can go home again -- and then pin that home to the sidebar in Finder.

Matt Elliott Senior Editor
Matt Elliott is a senior editor at CNET with a focus on laptops and streaming services. Matt has more than 20 years of experience testing and reviewing laptops. He has worked for CNET in New York and San Francisco and now lives in New Hampshire. When he's not writing about laptops, Matt likes to play and watch sports. He loves to play tennis and hates the number of streaming services he has to subscribe to in order to watch the various sports he wants to watch.
Expertise Laptops, desktops, all-in-one PCs, streaming devices, streaming platforms
Matt Elliott
2 min read
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The Home folder on your Mac contains a number of folders -- Applications, Desktop, Documents, Downloads, Movies, Music, Pictures, Public -- that you'll likely access frequently. But strangely, the Home folder is hard to find the in Finder by default. I'll show you how to find your Home folder and add it to Finder's sidebar for quick and easy access.

'Home' is actually your user folder

The first thing you should know about the Home folder is that it's not named Home. It features a home icon, but its title is the name you chose for your user account. It lives in the Users folder (along with any guest folders if you created additional user profiles).

How to find your Home folder

To find your Home folder, open Finder and use the keyboard shortcut Command-Shift-H. You can use the Go pull-down menu from the menu bar to go to the Home folder. (Oddly, the home folder is called Home in this menu.)

go-home.jpg
Matt Elliott/CNET

Move your Home

With your Home folder selected in Finder, hit Command-up arrow to move up one level in Finder. Now, you can click and drag your Home folder and drop it on Finder's sidebar.

Alternatively, you can go Finder > Preferences and select which folders you'd like to pin to the sidebar. In Preferences, click the Sidebar tab and then check the boxes for the folders you want in the sidebar and uncheck those you don't.

A parting note about iCloud Drive

With MacOS Sierra, you can sync your Desktop and Documents folders to iCloud Drive. If you choose this option, then you'll notice that the Desktop and Documents folders are moved from your Home folder to the iCloud Drive folder. By default, these two synced folders show up in iCloud section of the Finder sidebar, which means you might not necessarily need your Home folder in the Finder sidebar, too.