How to Create a Guest Account on Mac

If you find yourself always letting people borrow your computer, here’s how you can create a guest account so they don’t mess with your own files.

There are many times when guests might come in and someone needs to check their email or the kids want to go online to chat with their friends. That’s okay, but sometimes you don’t want them to play on your own user account. That’s why having a guest account can be great.

It allows guests to borrow your Mac for a while, while protecting your own apps and files from accidental deletion or movement.

With a guest account, you can also limit what users can and cannot access; This not only protects you from accessing your own personal files, but can also prevent any malware from infecting your Mac.

If that’s your thing and you want to give guests their own account to do their job, here’s how to create a guest account on Mac.

Creating a Guest Account in OS X

In OS X, the guest account is actually already created, but you just need to enable and configure it.

First open it from the Dock (or go to the Apple logo in the menu bar and select it from there). From there, click on it.

If you have an admin password set (which you most likely have), click the padlock in the lower left corner of the window and enter your admin password to make changes.

After that, click on the icon in the left sidebar and check the box. From here you can also enable (and set up) parental controls and choose whether guests should have access to shared folders.

At this point, there is nothing else you need to configure. The guest account will be activated and when a guest wants to use your computer, simply log out of your current account by going to the Apple logo in the menu bar and selecting .

Using the Guest Account

When a guest uses the guest account on your computer, they are given some sort of own user account, but any files they download are automatically deleted when they log out of the guest account.

The guest account can also access apps you have installed in your user account, depending on whether you allow certain apps to be installed for all users or only for your user account when you first install it. The good news is that saved passwords for any apps won’t be migrated to the guest account, so guests will need to log in with their own credentials to access apps that require login, and they won’t have access to any of them. your own accounts in any app.

The guest account also works with Find My Mac, so if a Mac is lost, the user who found it and wants to return it can log in as a guest if their user account is password protected. That way they can be online, which will send you the location of your Mac.

As mentioned earlier, you can enable parental controls on a guest account so you can do things like block certain apps from being accessed or block certain websites. You can even set a time limit on how long a guest can borrow your computer (this might sound a bit rude, but to each their own. It can be a referral feature for kids).

You can also block other random features of OS X, such as preventing users from using the built-in camera, dictating or changing any settings. Usually, you don’t need to enable parental controls anyway, especially if you have trusted friends who borrow your computer for a few minutes, but the features are there at least in case you want to enable them at some point.