Mac OS X: Unlocking Your Desktop

There are many reasons for unlocking your desktop, but a great many more for leaving it locked the first of which is that the Desktop is more than simply a folder on OS X. Having lots of files on your desktop will affect the performance of your Mac (see here, here, and here).

However there are a number of cases where you might want to, temporarily, unlocking the desktop so you can save files to it.


First of all bring up finder and right-click your Desktop and select "Get Info";

Desktop Folder Properties

There is a check-box at the top called "Locked", un-check it.

And you're done ... Easy wasn't it?