We really should set aside an hour each month to explore lesser-known features in macOS. In today’s exploration I bring you Get Info’s sibling Inspector, exact duplication, a free slideshow, and an Easter Egg.

The Finder’s contextual menus

Select one or more items in the Finder and Control-click (or equivalent) to open the contextual menu (which Apple now seemingly likes to refer to as the context menu, which it isn’t). You can also combine, or add when the menu is open, a modifier key. Among the commands on offer are:

• Open With to open a file using the app of your choice. With the Option key this becomes Always Open With, which combines that with changing that file’s default app as well.
• Get Info to display that dialog, discussed below. With the Option key this becomes Show Inspector, to open that window instead.
• Duplicate to make an APFS clone file of the original with the current user’s permissions. With the Option and Shift keys held this becomes Duplicate Exactly, which requires authentication and preserves the permissions of the original file. Otherwise the results are identical.
• Quick Look to display a QuickLook preview of the item(s). With the Option key this becomes Slideshow as described below.
• Copy to copy the item. With the Option key this becomes Copy As Pathname, which copies the pathname of the item instead.

The others should be self-evident, and the power of the last, Services available for that item, should never be underestimated.

Slideshow

The slideshow offered is both useful and impressive if you haven’t seen it. Select a bunch of your photos and try this command out. The selected items are displayed in full screen mode, with Dark appearance, a set of floating controls, and will cycle automatically through them in sequence.

To quit the slideshow just click on the X button at the right of the controls.

Get Info and the Inspector

I’m sure you’re thoroughly familiar with the Get Info dialog, stretching from its summary information at the top, passing through More info, Open with and Preview to end in Sharing & Permissions. That’s intended to remain static, displaying the information for just the file selected when you opened its window.

Hold the Option key with the contextual menu open and that command changes to show the Inspector instead. Its window and contents are almost identical, but with the Inspector open you can select a different item and the Inspector’s contents change to show the information for the newly selected item. If you need to check through information on a series of files, this is just the job.

When used with multiple selected items, Get Info opens a new dialog for each of them, whereas the Inspector opens a single window containing a summary of them all.

There is actually another small difference between the Get Info dialog and the Inspector: the latter has a slightly shallower title bar.

The Get Info Easter Egg

As a reward for your time spent exploring these features, they also come with an Easter Egg. To see this in action, open the contextual menu on a file, then hold the Shift key and keep it held when you select the Get Info command. With that key held down, the Get Info dialog opens in slow motion. Keeping the key held, click on the window’s red Close button, and the window shrinks back down to the selected item in slow motion. Without having to change any hidden settings to enable it.