Bloom - Preview
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The transcript will follow that audio as the video plays. Scroll and click on the transcript to jump to that part of the video.
5,136
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70
Likes
After winning the MacStories Mac App of the Year award for 2025, Lee decided he really needed to give Bloom a spin to see if the plaudits were well-earned. It's safe to say that when it comes to looking for a replacement for the macOS Finder, Bloom is a market leader. As well as configuring different layouts and saving them as workspaces, you can customise the inspector with custom one-click actions and show metadata information that is otherwise hidden.
On top of this, you can organise your files with custom workflows, rename them in bulk with a variety of parameters and regular expressions, and so much more. In this video, Lee walks you through Bloom in great detail.
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As of this recording, Bloom runs on macOS 14.0 and above.
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(8 comments posted)
No Question Here, Just Some Praise.
I have to admit that I was pretty excited about seeing Bloom covered in this weeks video. I've been using it since last summer and after a few months, including some back and forth discussions with the developer, it had taken over most all of my File Management needs. It's also eliminated reliance on a few other File Managers that I used before but gave up because they didn't support more than two panels,
I hesitated watching this video because I thought I was already a superuser and wouldn't learn much. I was wrong. Great job here in covering Bloom including some areas that I had mostly overlooked. While the video was almost 50 minutes long, I felt that it could have easily been double that. There are so many features that you might miss unless you really dig in to the Settings. I watched this video on one monitor and ran Bloom on the other monitor. I find that is often the best way to watch these videos. So, that made the 50 minute video take 2.5 hours. I'm glad I stuck with it though.
Before watching this video, I had completely discounted the importance of the Inspector panel. I was assuming that it was just a slightly better Preview pane. I was completely wrong. I had overlooked the power of the Extended Information and what it can do when coupled with some very simple bash scripts. I implemented your Word Count example and will likely build several more of these.
I had used various Workspaces but had never combined them with Sync Browsing. What a revolutionary feature. I created one of these to help me sort my photo collection easier. I suspect that I will do the same to help me process Home Automation videos faster too.
I had also ignored how powerful Custom Actions are. While watching this video, I paused several times and used Perplexity to help me write a few simple bash scripts to use as Custom Actions to help me with some complex file renaming and it worked great. While Bloom does have its own very nice renaming feature (Rename Sorcery), I found that some of Bloom's built-in variables like $Height and $Width didn't work well on my MKV files. Custom Actions let me work around that easily. In fact, I might not even need my third-party file rename tool anymore.
Organize is another feature that I had completely overlooked. Calling it a mini-Hazel is appropriate. While I still have Hazel and will likely never give it up, the commands that Bloom provides are very powerful and I could see some folks replacing Hazel with Bloom.
I also appreciated the links you provided. Somehow, I had hadn't noticed the AppleScript features before. These will come in very handy.
Also, while you didn't mention it, I noticed that Bloom lets you customize its Context Menu. It's rather rudimentary but I wouldn't be surprise to see more come of that.
Again, thanks for the great video. I've seen several videos on YouTube discussing Bloom but they all fell short. Videos like this one make my subscription to ScreenCastOnline worth it.
Thanks for taking the time to write this Jason. I can't lie, I really enjoyed creating this one because the more I worked on the outline, the more I kept thinking how I would use that feature myself day to day. It's impossible to use all of the apps we cover here daily so when one comes along that you know is going to slip into your workflow with ease, it makes the recording process much easier. Custom Inspector -> Organize -> I see these as features people would skate over or miss without a guide on how to use it, so pleased you enjoyed them.
Customising the Context Menu - I was reaching a point with this, and other videos, where I was conscious of time. I knew if I wasn’t' careful I'd be hitting the hour mark - and my ideal sweet-spot for the Friday videos is 30-45 minutes. I want to give value for the subscription, whilst still being respectful and mindful of attention so when I reluctantly drop a feature, it goes into a pile for potential future Tuesday Tip videos because then I can give it the attention it deserves without skimming it.
You'll see another example in the coming weeks. Today sees BetterTouchTool Part One, and Part Two will land soon. In both of those I didn't cover Floating Menus however I'm just wrapping up a Tip video that spends 15 minutes on this game-changing feature in the app.
Hi Lee, thank you for bringing this app to our attention! One small question: how do you enable the blue highlight in the breadcrumb so that the current folder is blue?
Hi Jason - not a problem! And - well, I can't lie - I don't remember configuring that blue highlight in the Path Bar. Do you not see it yourself?
Hi Lee, thank you for bringing this app to our attention! One small question: how do you enable the blue highlight in the breadcrumb so that the current folder is blue?
I just see a grey colored highlight
Interesting. Mine shows Blue also. I also have Dim Inactive Panels enabled with the slider around 50%. I'm not sure if that matters though. Make sure you are on the latest version. I am running 1.5.25 and it shows Blue.
I figured it out. The option is in System Settings > Appearance. My Theme Color was graphite. Changing it to blue fixes the "issue".
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