Changing File Associations in OSX

File associations in OSX have always been somewhat of a mystery to me. I have file types that seem to want to open in consistently “random” applications. To fix this behavior is rather easy!

To begin, in Finder select the file that is of a type you want to re-associate. Press the command-i key to open up the file’s Get Info window. Look for a section named “Open with:” and expand it if necessary. Now select the new application from the drop down list of available application. If you would like all files of that type to open up in the same application, simply click the “Change All..” button!

It’s that easy!

5 Responses to “Changing File Associations in OSX”

  1. gels said on January 18th, 2007 at 11:15 pm

    That problem has been plaguing me for MONTHS.
    Thanks!

  2. crusy said on April 13th, 2007 at 2:50 pm

    Oh my god, thank you

  3. Allan said on July 2nd, 2007 at 12:10 pm

    Awesome!!! I’ve been plagued with that as well. I would always ‘right-click’ the file and select ‘open with’ and click on ‘other’ then like Windows, I assumed it would do that for all those file types.

    One less mac annoyance :)

  4. Rob said on July 10th, 2007 at 2:57 pm

    How about a way to edit the list of “open with…” suggestions.
    A jpeg will be offered opening by a list of about 30 apps and commands, including Colorsync Utility and Divx Converter.

    I have tried reseting the launch services database and various other maintenance procedures.- no joy
    Is there a way?

  5. sfryer said on July 29th, 2007 at 9:08 pm

    I recently turned on “File Vault” in OSX 10.4. Now every time my laptop boots the file associations get reset to default. It’s extremely annoying considering that I have a dozen or so apps with dozens of file associations which I prefer over the default ones and must reset each and every time. Is there a file which OSX uses for maintaining these associations which I can replace with a cron job or rc file or something?