How To Work Around the Safari Download Location Bug.

Hi this is Gary with MacMost.com. Let's take a look at why sometimes the ask for each download setting in Safari doesn't work. So when you click on a download link at Safari to download a file, it will automatically download to either your downloads folder or another folder that you have specified. But there's also a setting that should ask you to choose a download location and change a file name each time. However, as a lot of people have reported, this often doesn't work. So here I am in Safari, and I'm going to use my site and the download link for the Keyboard Shortcuts PDF as an example. When I click on this link, it should download this PDF. And in fact, it does. And you can see how the little icon jumped from the link into the dock here because I've got the downloads folder in the dock. Otherwise, you may see it jump to here, the little Downloads List button that lists downloads. And you will also find it in your Downloads folder because that's what I have set as the location for downloads. In fact, if I go in Safari, and then Settings, and then under General, I can see my file download location is Downloads. I could change that to another location and set it to any folder I want. So it doesn't have to be the Downloads folder. I could also change it to ask for each download. And when I do this, it should actually prompt me for a location and also allow me to change the name of the file when I download. The problem is it doesn't work. If I click this, it works just like before. You can see the file goes to the Downloads folder, and it's listed here. It just went to the Downloads folder and completely ignored my request to ask me where to save it instead. So if you've been frustrated by this, you're not alone. A lot of people have experienced this bug, and it's inconsistent. Some people report that it works okay. Others report that it works for certain files and not for others. So it appears this really is just a bug in Safari. This feature just doesn't work properly. By the way, if you find these videos valuable, consider joining the more than 2,000 others that support MacMost at Patreon. You get exclusive content, course discounts, and more. You can read about it at macmost.com slash Patreon. So what can you do if you want to actually decide where each file goes as you download it? You've got a couple of options. The first is pretty simple, and that is don't simply click on a download link. Instead, use two fingers on a trackpad, a right click on a mouse, or you can hold the control key and click on the link. And this brings up the context menu. And you'll get download linked file here, but you also get download linked file as. And you can see the three dots there, the ellipsis in the menu item, indicating that you're going to be prompted for more instructions if you use this. And indeed, if I select this, it does allow me now to select a location for the file, and I can put it anywhere I want. And I can also change the file name here. So in most cases, this will solve the problem. You just have to remember to two finger click, right click, or control click to bring up the context menu and use download linked file as. But there are some cases where you can't do that. If a website is scripted to automatically start a download, say when you go to a new page, or by choosing certain things on a dynamic webpage, then you have no opportunity to actually click on a link. The page itself triggers the download, and you never get to decide that you want to download the linked file as. Instead, the download just happens. And in that case, it saves to your default location, downloads, or whatever you've set it to. Fortunately, there's a solution in the form of a terminal command. You're actually going to use the terminal to change a setting in Safari, a setting that's not actually visible in the settings window. Here's the command. It's default write, which allows you to write a setting. And the set of settings is com.apple.safari.sandboxbroker. So this defines kind of a part of the settings that you're going to change something. The setting itself is always prompt for download folder. And that's all one word. And you can see capitalization matters. So make sure you type exactly. I'll include the code at the post at backpost.com so you can copy and paste this if you want. Then space dash bool for boolean, in other words, a true or false value, and the value you want is true. If I set this like that, it will work instantly. I don't need to restart Safari or anything like that. So now look at what happens when I click on this link. It prompts me, just like if I had used the context menu and download linked file as, but I just did a regular click. So now I can choose the location any way I want here and decide where it goes. I can change the file name if I want, and I can click save or cancel. And by the way, if you want to go back to the original setting of not having this turned on, you can, of course, use default write and set to false instead of true. But the default is actually not to have the setting there at all. So you can use defaults, delete, and then the exact same set of settings and the exact same setting like that. Do that, and now it's back like it was. So if I click here, you can see it just goes to the downloads folder. So hopefully this video will be short-lived and you won't need this in the future as Apple at some point fixes this bug and makes it so that when you set it in the Safari settings it actually obeys your wishes. Until then, I hope you find this useful. Thanks for watching.