3-Master Steam's Built-In Views

Categories are great ways to organize your library, but when's the last time you played with Steam's built-in views and settings? Personally, I like to keep my games in Steam's Grid View, just because I enjoy seeing the game art for each title in my library (even if that means I have to scroll forever to find what I want to play—but that's what categories are for!). But you actually have three options: Detail View puts your game titles in the sidebar on the left, and clicking any one of them brings up a detail page on the right, including buttons to install or play the game. You'll also see aggregated headlines related to the game, friends who play the game, your achievements, and links to the game's store page, forums, groups, and so on. List View gives you a single pane list-view of your games, organized alphabetically (by default) with an art thumbnail next to each name. You also get categories for status (installed/downloading/ready to play/shortcut/etc), favorites, the game's metascore, and when you last played the game. Click any column header to sort your library by it. Grid View is a simple grid with tiles for each game arranged in a grid inside your Steam window. Grid view also gives you a zoom slider you can use to make the tiles bigger (upside: you see the art better, downside: you get fewer games on-screen) or smaller as you see fit. If you don't like the art for a game (or it doesn't have art on the tile), just right-click it and select "Set Custom Image." Download whatever image you want to use for the tile from the web, and use it! Most people probably know about the views already, but you may not have actually tried playing with them. For years I stuck in detail view, just because it was the default and it worked just fine. It wasn't until I spent a little time fiddling with grid view that I really came to enjoy it, even at the expense of having to scroll to browse. It feels more like browsing game boxes or an arcade selector than a straight text list. All the views obey the filters and categories we mentioned earlier.