Hey. I have just installed Yosemite OSx and loving it. However the one item that is annoying is the lack of ability to add the Apple iCloud drive to your desktop. I don’t use finder that much and like to have my connected devices on the desktop. A way around this is to follow the procedures below. Open your Home / Profile and then click on the drop down cog. Click on ‘Show View Options’
Click on Show Library Folder
You should now see the Library folder in your home / profile folder.
Open the Library folder and then look for a folder called Mobile Documents
Right click on Mobile documents and select ‘Make Alias’
I have just left the Alias as the default name.
When you open the folder you are going to see lots of other folders. The folder we are interested in is iCloud Drive
We need to make another Alias. So right click on the iCloud Drive and select ‘Make Alias’
I have called my Alias iCloud Drive
Now you are going to want to drag the iCloud Drive alias that you created over to your desktop. When you do this you will be presented with the following message. At this point select Delete.
Your iCloud Drive alias will now be on your desktop
There is one oddity with it. When you open the iCloud Drive on your desktop it will not display Preview or Pages. However if you hit the iCloud Drive on the left hand side it will then display all your content. A small niggle that I can live with
I hope you have found this post useful and I look forward to Apple providing a native way of adding iCloud Drive to the desktop.
Tags: Apple, iCloud, iCloudDrive, Yosemite
Craig Wallace is a highly motivated IT professional working in the City of London. Craig's main areas and passions are VMware, PowerShell and Active Directory. Outside of IT Craig enjoys motorbike racing
October 18th, 2014 at 1:49 pm
Thanks for the info… that’s just what I needed.
In reference to the Pages folder not showing up, I just made an alias of that folder in the iCloud Drive folder. Then I can see if from my desktop folder. True, if access iCloud Drive from sidebar, I see two of each folder but that’s ok with me.
October 18th, 2014 at 3:43 pm
You are more than welcome and thanks for the feedback and extra info.
November 24th, 2014 at 11:14 pm
Thanks for the tip to quickly access iCloud drive. In my case instead of putting a link on the Desktop, i Made an Alias of Preview sub-folders (i organized PDF’s in sub-folders stored in iCloud Drive Preview) that i use most often, and drag the alias to Finder’s dock. That way i can quickly access these folders by 1) click on a free spot on the Desktop; 2) press ^-ctrl-cmd (this opens a Finder window and selects iCloud Drive), 3) click on my folder’s alias. It’s true i can retrace the path from the top folder of iCloud Drive (i.e. open Preview then go down to the target sub-folder), however the alias makes accessing the sub-folder(s) more quickly,
April 9th, 2015 at 3:04 pm
Hi WT –
This seems like a great fix — I use alias routing all the time for other folders — but after following your instructions, I can’t seem to find a Mobile Documents folder in my Library. I’m running Yosemite 10.10.2, and I have all sorts of docs (Pages, Numbers, GoodReader, etc.) stored in iCloud Drive.
Did Apple rename the folder or rearrange things to make this impossible? Do you have further suggestions?
Thanks!
April 9th, 2015 at 3:07 pm
Never mind! Missed that first step…duh. Thank you!
April 28th, 2015 at 7:14 pm
Hey Wallace, you can also just drag the iCloud folder from the path bar.
http://i.imgur.com/4UI6rQN.png