macos - Make another folder my desktop on Mac

I will be buying a new iMac soon but the price to upgrade the storage is horrendous. I started researching and figured out that I could simply buy an external SSD and then store everything onto that. As I was doing my research, I stumbled upon this question. Can I make an external folder my Desktop? In the meaning to have the Desktop folder on the external drive, and then anything I save onto the visible Desktop would be saved into the external SSD. Would that be possible and if so how? Differently, would I be able to move the actual desktop folder to an external drive?

Answer

As literally no one answered me, I tried to figure it out myself. It works like that:

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  Step 1: Make sure the folder to be relinked is empty of all content, except possibly for DS_Store files and other hidden files. This can be easily verified in the Finder.

  
  


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  Step 2: Make a backup! This is crucial, since if you mess up there isn't an undo button you can use.

  
  


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  Step 3: Log in as the alternative administrator. Do NOT use Fast User Switching to do this - you'll need to do a full log out and back in.

  
  


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  Step 4: Launch the Terminal.

  
  


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  Step 5: Become the root user, by typing: sudo bash

  
  


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  Step 6: Delete the folder to be relinked using the rm command with the -r switch, for recursive (using the desktop of a user with short name julo as an example): rm -r /Users/julo/Desktop

  
  


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  Step 7: If necessary, create the folder to link to, using mkdir.

  
  


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  Step 8: Link the folders (again using katie's Desktop, and the target a folder inside her Documents folder called Work): ln -s /Users/julo/Documents/Work /Users/julo/Desktop

  
  


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  Step 10: Exit the root shell by typing: exit

  
  


• Step 11: Quit the Terminal.


• Step 12: Log out of the alternate admin user.


• Step 13: Log into the account that was changed, to verify that it worked. (In this example, I'd log in as julo.)

EDIT: Another option to do this is as follow:

know this thread's been dead a long time, but I think I found a reasonably good solution:

I started by swapping my ~/Desktop folder out with a symbolic link pointing to a folder on my external hard drive.

~/Desktop #symlink → /Volumes/[external drive]/Desktop

However, since I wanted my account to have a functioning desktop when the external drive was offline, I then created a second (local) Desktop within my ~/Library folder, along with a symbolic link like so:

~/Library/DesktopSwap/Desktop.offline #symlink → ~/Library/DesktopSwap/Desktop

Finally, I created a shell script and Finder service (via Automator Applescript), that swap out the two symlinks as follows:

~/Library/Scripts/swapDesktops.sh
#!/bin/bash
sudo mv ~/Desktop ~/Desktop.swap
sudo mv ~/Library/DesktopSwap/Desktop.offline ~/Desktop
sudo mv ~/Desktop.swap ~/Library/DesktopSwap/Desktop.offline
killAll Finder​

swap desktops [Finder service]

do shell script "~/Library/Scripts/swapDesktops.sh" with administrator privileges​

EDIT 2: Lastly, you can try with that: - click on the following application: "Terminal"

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  type: sudo rm -rf ~/Desktop/

  
  


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  entered your password (the password of your account on the mac)

  
  


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  type: ln -s ~/Skydrive/Desktop

  
  

Note that "~" is a shortcut used in our example to mean: "Users/Julo".

This worked. The source I found this at is here.