In MacSimum I was reading about an app called Yep, the ultimate PDF organiser. It does seem pretty cool and has all the bells and whistles to find anything, anytime. It occurred to me, though, that millions of us already have a pretty good PDF filer on our desktop, and didn't even know it.

iTunes is quite a well-known program for organising and playing music. It has morphed into a video and TV show player too. But did you know you can store all your PDF documents on it too and use the powerful iTunes search tool to keep track of them? Well, you can.

How to sort and search PDFs on iTunes

All you do is make a new folder in iTunes and drag the PDFs from your hard drive into this new folder.

To find the title of a PDF at a later date, just apply a search in itunes toolbar and iTunes will turn it up for you.

Double click on a PDF title and it will open in your default Preview or Adobe app.

Precise search

Searching for PDFs by keyword in iTunes isn't perfect, and where $35 Yep excels, but iTunes has a powerful search tool and if you go beyond a barebones title for your PDF's you will improve your chances of good results.

Keeping it simple, I would use the Get Info command and just write a descriptive entry for the Name of the file! Activities for teaching adults how to be funny I would then expand the name with some more keywords to further describe the content covered. eg Activities for teaching adults how to be funny - jokes, mimic


Create a smart playlist and then you can right click and Edit it to search for specific PDFs eg In the search fields write

name CONTAINS teaching
name CONTAINS jokes

This will show results for all Pdfs containing teaching and jokes in the name field.

If that tip just saved you $35 and / or a lot of time - send half the money to Yep to invest in a decent iTunes killer and the rest to a charity of your choice.