10 Ways To Personalize Your Mac

Here are some ways you can make yoru Mac look different than everyone else's. You can change the way icons look on the Desktop, customize the Dock and Menu Bar, set the accent colors and much more.

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Video Transcript: Hi, this is Gary with MacMost.com. Let's look at ten ways you could personalize your Mac.
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There are many ways to customize your the look of macOS so your Mac can look different than everybody else's. To start let's go into System Preferences and then General. The easiest and most obvious way to personalize things is to switch between Light and Dark. A lot of Mac users still just use light as the default and it's how we're used to seeing our Mac. But you can switch to dark mode and then backgrounds will turn black with white writing on them and other elements will change. You can also select Auto so that it's light during the day and dark at night. 
Right under that you've got Accent color and Highlight color. So usually this is set to the multi setting here and this allows each app to determine its own accent and highlight color. For instance, here we have Numbers and we could see that's green here. We've got green accents and highlights. In Pages it's orange here. Both Accents and Highlights. But if we were to set a system color for that, like say blue, then all the apps abandon their default and turn blue. So here we've got blue highlights in Pages and blue highlights in Numbers. Notice you can have your highlights color be something different. So, for instance, I could go with a green highlight here. You could see I've got a green highlight but the accents are still blue. If I set the accent color to match the app I can have the highlight color match the app as well or I can have the highlight color be something specific.
Now underneath this you'll see All wallpaper tinting in windows. But there's a stronger setting for the same thing if you go into Accessibility and then Display. Here if you use Reduced Transparency it completely removes any tinting of the windows so now you can see how the white of the Menu Bar and the white of the windows and Toolbars is absolute. Now you can go a step further than that and say Increase Contrast. This gives your Mac a really cool retro look that effects pretty much all apps. Also there are a couple of other settings here you may want to check out like changing the Menu Bar size to Large, and Show Toolbar button shapes. So see these Toolbar buttons here, if I select that you could see outlines around the buttons. 
Let's just look at the Desktop Icons here. I've got a few icons here. I usually like to keep this clean but you may have a bunch here. There are a lot of things you can do to customize how this looks. If you have some icons on your Desktop then it really is going to dominate the look of your Mac. You're going to see them all the time. So if you go to Finder to View and then Show View Options, then you can change the icon size to something else. So you can make much larger icons if you want or smaller ones. You can also change the spacing. You also have the ability to change the text size and the most dramatic change is going from label position on the bottom to Label Position on the Right like that. Another thing you can do is Show Item Info on and then you get things like the dimensions of images and the length of sounds and videos. You also could turn on Stacks, like this, and this will group like items together. You can open up the Stacks like that. So even if you have many or dozens of items on your Desktop they will be grouped together in stacks and you won't have as many of them. You could go to View, Group Stacks By and change it to something else like, for instance, Date Created and it will group things together in things like Today, or by Year, Yesterday. That kind of thing. 
You can also customize the icon of anything on the Desktop. Let's create a new Folder on the Desktop. We can customize that folder to have a different icon than the standard folder thing. Just do Command i to get Info and then you could drag and drop an image, like this one, right in there and it should change to match that icon. To remove it you can select and just hit the Delete key on your keyboard and it goes back to the default. If for some reason you can't drag and drop an icon there a handy trick is to double click to open it up in Preview. Command A to select all and C to copy. Then go to the icon here and select it and then do Command V to paste. This will actually paste the image itself, not the file, so it works more often and you can see here I've got a nice icon for this folder, different than the standard one. 
You can do the same thing to put Apps on your Desktop if you want using any icon. So in the Finder go to the Applications folder and then let's select the app that you want to put on the Desktop. Let's drag it there. Now just by dragging something out of the Applications folder is going to give you this little curly arrow there which creates an Alias. So we'll drop that alias there. The Application is still in the Application's folder. This is just an alias, or shortcut to it. So if we want to change the icon for this we could do it the same way. Do Command i and let's add this custom icon here to it and now we have the Music App shown here on the Desktop. But it's a custom icon. Unfortunately, you can't add these to the Dock. If I were to drag this down to the Dock here it would appear just as a standard Music icon. There's no good way to customize the icons in the Dock. 
But you can do other things with the Dock. Of course you can customize the order that things are in dragging the icons back and forth. You can drag an icon away if you want to remove it. You can go back to the Applications folder here and add any app that you want to the Dock. So you can customize the Dock to fit your needs. Have your most commonly accessed apps and have them grouped together. You can also go to System Preferences and then Dock & Menu Bar. Select Dock & Menu Bar here and you could change the Dock size to make them smaller or larger. It will only go up to the size that they will all fit in. You can have magnification turned on so as you move your mouse over the Dock it does that. If you want to go to extreme you can position the Dock on the left or right side of the screen. So now it will appear here on the right which will look different than most Mac users. 
Another place you can customize things is the Notification Center. On the right here you'll see the different widgets here. If you go down to the bottom you could Edit Widgets and then you could select the widgets that you want to add and then move these around and highly customize how Notification Center works. So if you haven't had the chance play around with this and add widgets that you want that you'll find useful here. Most of the time when people say that the widgets in Notification Center aren't useful they haven't taken the time to customize them to actually make them useful for what you want to see. You could also use third party apps like this one right here to add different things. Like this one will allow you to add your photos, specific photos, unlike the Photos widget here which will add things like Memories and Featured Photos. Just search for Notification Center Widgets in the App Store. 
Now you can also customize buttons here at the top right and Control Center. So this is Control Center. You can click here and bring this up. If you go to System Preferences and then Dock & Menu Bar and Control Center is under here. You could look at each one of these and decide which ones are shown in the Menu Bar, which ones are shown in Control Center, like these you can add those to it. You could also drag and drop directly from here. So, for instance, if I wanted to add Air Drop to the Menu Bar I could. Then I could hold the Command key down and drag these around, left and right, or down and away, to get rid of them. Also you've got the Clock here at the upper right. You can access that by going to Clock here and then you can have it do different things like show or hide the date, have it be an analog clock that takes up less space, and get that looking just like you want. 
Not every customization has to be visual. If you go into System Preferences and then to Sound then you can, under Sound Effects, you can change the Alert Sound. There are a variety that come with your Mac. But you could also add your own custom sounds here. The way to do that is in the Finder you want to Go, hold the option key down so you could go to the Library, and then go down to Sounds. You can see here I've added three sounds. The format that works best is the AIFF format and each sound will export to that. Although sometimes M4A or MP3 sounds will work. It depends what's actually contained inside the file since those files actually contain lots of different types of compression. But you could see I've got these three in here and in System Preferences under Sound I have them listed. There's one right there.
Now the one big customization you're probably surprised I haven't mentioned yet is to change the Desktop Wallpaper. Of course you can do that by going into System Preferences and then Desktop & Screensaver and under Desktop here you can set this to anything you want. You can actually drag and drop an image right into here or you can select from the many Desktop pictures that Apple includes. You could also select a solid color or click here to select a custom color. You could select from your photos. So you can have a photo like that. If you selected something that's a group like here under Photos, Favorites you could actually have it do things like change the picture every so often and have it do it in a sequential or random order. You could also include folders here. So if you have a folder that has some pictures in it, and I do here in the Finder under here under Miscellaneous there's a bunch of images, I can drag and drop that here and I can see those appear here and I could select one of these or have it set to change the picture. So you could literally make the Desktop background anything that you want. Notes that since things like the Menu Bar typically are tinted with the background that's really going to do more than just be the picture you've got. It's going to change the whole look of everything. So you could see how it changes the Menu Bar for what I have selected. 
Now while we're here, here's one bonus one. You can set the Screensaver. So you don't really need a screensaver but it's a nice way to customize your Mac, to make it look a little different. You can set it to how quickly it goes on and then you can choose one of the ones here. It's well known now that there's a bug in the early versions of Monterey that a lot of these photos ones don't work. But once they're working again in a future version you could actually have one of these and show your own photos. But there are some really interesting ones here including the Monterey one which you could see working right here. It's actually going to use the Monterey background in it's animated version of it. There's also the new glow one that's part of Mac Monterey. Then all sorts of ones you've probably seen before like Drift and Flurry and Shell and all these others. One thing I recently learned is that when you're using one of these with that Show Clock option turned On the location of the clock actually changes. I moves around with twelve noon being at the top of the screen and midnight being at the bottom of the screen. So here at 9:42 a.m. it's to the top left. 
So there are a whole bunch of different ways to personalize your Mac. Hope you found this useful. Thanks for watching.

Comments: 10 Responses to “10 Ways To Personalize Your Mac”

Tom

2 months ago

One thing I recently learned is that when you’re using one of these with that Show Clock option turned On the location of the clock actually changes. I must have missed something. Where do I find this option setting? Thanks.

Gary Rosenzweig

Tom: That’s not an option. It is always on. Or do you mean the “Show Clock” option itself? That’s an option on some of the screen savers. It is a checkbox. Look at 10:42 right when I’m saying that and you’ll see it on the screen.

Razvan Mihai

Gary: Is there a way to customize the Desktop such that the icons get arranged from left to right regardless of how you sort/group them? I find this icon arrangement choice strange, considering we read from left to right; Finder shows icons from left to right in icon view, including the Desktop folder.

Razvan: No, they desktop has always treated the top right corner as the starting point. It is probably this way since the menu bar is left to right and when menus drop down they would obscure the icons.

Gary: I see, thanks. While decluttering my Desktop, I couldn’t see the Name sort criteria in Finder. Instead, I see the column header Today. I have noticed the same Finder behavior when in Downloads. Is this the expected behavior? Can I Name sort these two folders, or do I need to copy them someplace else to get them decluttered?

Razvan: it sounds like you have turned on View, Use Groups (Called Use Stacks when viewing the Desktop as the Desktop) and set the groups to be a date. Turn off Use Groups to sort the entire contents of the folder.

Indeed! An interesting Finder feature helping to get a different perspective on a pile of files that need sorting. Thanks a lot, Gary.

Faye Nowell

1 month ago

Is there any way we can change the color of an entire file folder on the desktop, rather than using a colored dot to help it stand out? (The dots are a bit too hard to see!) This would make all of my file folders easier to sort and find. Thanks!

Faye: Dots? Do you mean the tags? Those aren’t supposed to be for decoration. See https://macmost.com/how-to-use-tags-to-organize-your-files.html
If you want to change the folder icon itself, see: https://macmost.com/how-to-create-custom-folder-and-drive-icons-for-your-mac.html

FAYE NOWELL

Thanks so much, Gary! Your tutorial was really helpful. I follow your Macmost column every week and keep learning new tips and tricks. Happy holidays! 🎄

10 Ways To Personalize Your Mac

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