Buttons
By default Tidy Up! loads all of the disks that are mounted on the desktop, the Applications Support item and three folders contained in the user home directory, Document, Pictures and Music.
Location Item
Invisible items are represented as a ghost icon image.
When opening a location to scan you can browse and exclude the items you want by clicking on the X image to the left of the items' icon. If there are excluded items, a pulldown menu represented by the triangle image will appear and will allow you to restore the excluded items.
In Tidy Up! the criteria panes are grouped into five collections of criteria sets which are joined by the searchable item's kind.
You can manage the visibility of the criteria panes through the toolbar's pulldow menu or the main menu.
Tidy Up! allows you to do four main kinds of searches: duplicate items, unique items, special searches and searches with custom criteria.
Where applicable the "(type of criteria) is same" and "(type of criteria) is unique" options are also available.
Please note that it isn't possible to mix the unique with the same options. You can do searches for duplicates or for uniques, but you shouldn't worry about this, Tidy Up! will do the work for you and will allow you to do only the permitted searches by changing or disabling the necessary criteria. So, if you have trouble with a disabled criterion use the Reset button as the "last straw".
Clicking on the triangle button to the left of the criteria name allows you to have access to the options of the single criterion.
To enable the content of the single criterion you must select the check button's criteria name. For details please refer to the single criterion pane.
Common Attributes
Contains the attributes that can be applied to all kinds of items that populate the hard disk.
Files & Packages
These attributes can be applied only to files and packages items.
Beside the options common to the other criteria panes, Files & Packages comes with further filters that helps you to restrict the number of found items.
Choose pulldown menu
Choose application's types (extensions) owner
Save and remove how you want the created sets by choosing the respective menu items' name.
Content of Files Options
Compare the contents of files using the CRC32 algorithm.
When you select a "compare the content of..." check button, also the correspondent same size's check button will select and it can't be unchecked while the compare option remains selected.
Miscellaneous
Can be applied to files and packages or folders.
By choosing an option Tidy Up! will disable the necessary criteria and they will remain unavailable until the chosen option is made inactive.
Music
All these options can be applied only to Mp3s and AACs song files.
To activate "Music Options" you must select at least one song's criteria.
If you do a search of the content of iTunes or iPod databases, you can create a playlist in iTunes populating it with the found songs and have a window that reports the dead tracks, these options allow you to delete the found records or files and synchronize the deletions with iTunes.
Special Searches
Is a set of searches that can help you to trace items that may waste disk space.
Compressed files: find the items compressed in the commony used formats like, sit, sitx. zip and many others.
List the content of temporary folder: list the content of the temporary folder in the selected disk(s) .
Document without creator application: finds all the document files for which the creator application is not on the selected disk(s).
Unused preferences: checks the contents of the user's preferences folder searching the owner's application's on the selected disk(s).
Adds a new location to the list to scan.
Removes the selected items of the list to scan.
You can select them by clicking on the icon image of the location item.
For Tidy Up! there isn't an original or a copy, all items are treated in the same manner. To identify which item must be trashed and which may be left on disk, you can use the Smart Baskets.
Despite the presence of "smart" criteria it is always better to subdivide your search into smaller searches, by adding sub-locations to the list to scan, so that you have fewer items to browse.