A Live Look At Customizing Folders On a Mac

Hi, it's me, Gary from MacMost.com, and here's a little live video action of me talking about folder customization, the new big feature, one of the new big features in macOS Tahoe. 

So let's take a look. 

All right, so this, of course, is one of the features. It's kind of a big new feature, but it's also small and it's also very optional. It's like one of those features where you just don't have to use it at all, and it won't really make any difference. You know, it's not one of those things where now something's different. No, you can just choose not to use this. 

And it's pretty useful, though. I think a lot of people are going to want to customize folders for various reasons, and we're going to talk about some of those reasons here. 

So I've got a set of folders here showing in my documents folder in my test account here, and they're all just the standard blue folder. So no real change here, except you'll notice this like white line that's up here near the top. That shows that there's something in the folder. 

Like if you actually have an empty folder, I'll create a new one here. Shift command N and there's the empty folder. There's nothing in there. And if you actually drag and drop something in there, I'm going to drag and drop this other folder in here. Watch the animation as you add something to it. It opens up and it accepts the folder there. 

I'll undo that there. So that's kind of a nice thing right there. It's a little bit different. But what you can actually do here to customize these folders is two things. One is you can change the color. The other is you can apply kind of an icon or emoji to it. 

And the colors is kind of a limited option, but it's also the most striking. Right now, these are all that kind of pale blue that we've been used to for a long time. And the idea here is we can change it to something else by selecting the folder. 

And you can control click, right click, two finger click on it. And then you'll see these color dots here. And you can choose one of these color dots. Let's change this folder to red like that. And then from that, you could see that the folder changes color pretty dramatically. 

Let's go look at orange. Let's look at yellow. And notice I'm actually adding tags to them. I've actually added all these tags. I could go here to customize folder and I could see the three tags I've added. The one to the left here, that's the one that's going to have the assigned color. 

So I can turn off yellow. I can turn off the orange. I can turn off the red and it goes back to nothing. I also have this nice remove all tags thing here. So the idea here is, and this is really interesting take that Apple does on this, is you apply a tag which existed before, but it's one of these special tags called red, orange, yellow, blue, green, and purple that use these colors. 

And there's also gray, sorry. And it's going to then apply that color to the folder. It doesn't work if you apply another kind of tag. So if I do command I on this to get info, and I look here and I apply one of these like yellow, it will apply yellow. 

But if I show all and apply like this important tag here, you could see the tag is applied, but oh, it actually, that was interesting. It applied red to it. I wonder if that's a change in the .1 release. Let's try this again. Important. Add that. 

You saw red applied for just a second there, and then it got hidden. So that's kind of interesting. You can apply, apparently now, well, let's try business here. And in this case, it didn't. Oh, no, it did. So it applied the gray to it. Interesting how it did that. 

So you can apply your own tags to it, which is interesting because now I can go to important here. I'll apply important. And let me go into Finder Settings and then go to Tags. And there's important. 

And I could click on important here. I could change its color to orange. When I change the important tag to orange. Oh, interesting. 

This does not update. So you can get info on it, and it didn't update the color. Now if I reapply important, will it do it? Nope. It didn't seem to do it. What if I removed the tag and implied right? And yes, it did, or at least it seemed to. 

But it seemed to not work. So Apple's done a little change here, and I think this was in the dot one. Let's see. Clear all this away. Apply important. You can see it applied orange there, but I didn't get the orange color. 

So, yeah, little buggy. This is what live's all about, right? Exploring together. If I want to do a polished video, and I have done a polished video on this, then I wouldn't need to do the live. We could explore things. 

So, basically, if you're going to ignore that kind of functionality, where you can apply other tags, you just want to apply one of these color tags to it. There. So the green tag, and now you've got green. 

Now the thing about these is you can't create your own custom color. It's gotta be one of these colors. So there are only seven of them, eight, if you include the pale blue original. So you don't have too much choice there, too much variety. 

I guess these go back to the original label colors that we used to have. And so the thing is, is that the, you know, I guess Apple originally just had those colors because they're easy to differentiate. And they felt if they allowed people to do like a different shade of green, that it would look a little bit too like hard to tell them apart. 

So that's how tags have just these label colors here. It's interesting. They don't let us make the folders any color we want, because I think it would be neat to have shading, like to have like a light green for a lot of your folders, because, you know, they all have something to do with that particular topic. 

And then a dark green for one because we wanted to emphasize it. But this is what we've got. We've just got these colors here that you could apply as tags and then the tags then give us the color. So coloring is kind of disappointing because you can't do the custom color and because you have to add a tag to it. 

So you see the tag there, you know, it is kind of neat knowing that you can actually look in the sidebar here and go and say show me all the yellow tagged things, and you should be able to see here. I don't know why, but you should be able to see all of the yellow tagged things there, including the folder there that has the yellow clearly has the yellow tag applied to it. 

So I know if I include important here, which still seems to have that red applied, I could do yellow. Now, if I go down to tags here, I can look at yellow and I still don't see that. If I list all tags here, I can, yellow, still don't see it. 

But if I look at important, well, I guess it just doesn't show folders when you look at tagged items. So that's kind of interesting there. 

Another thing to explore together. So, all right, you probably, if you go outside of the basics here of just looking at the, you know, the folder, let's see, if you go outside of the basics of the different colors here, it really falls apart. 

It's got to be one of these colors here and that's it. And you probably shouldn't try to stretch that further, which is different than what I'm going to show next, which are the icons, but seem to be pretty robust. 

So let's go ahead and take a look at those next. 

So in addition to the colors, you could assign an icon or an emoji to a folder. So let's continue to use this folder as our punching bag. And I'll go to Customize Folder. 

You have to right-click, go to Customize Folder, or with the folder selected, go to File, and then Customize Folder. And you can only do it when there's only one folder selected. 

So you can't apply the same icon to two by going there. You see, it just changes back to the old tags thing there instead of customize. So we've got a customized folder. 

And now you've got all of these symbols, which are all monochrome. And they can work kind of as an embossment on the folder. Is embossment a, is that a real word? I don't know. I made it up. 

So let's go and say I want to choose the, uh, the eye right here and you can see how it embosses the folder there. And you see the preview here at the top. Let's go. We can do lips. We can do mustache. 

You can go down here, cup of coffee, right? There's tennis ball. Uh, there's some sports, you know, you got some skiing, you've got, uh, you know, whatever this sport is, whatever the sport is. 

So yeah, you've got a lot of this stuff and some are better than others. But the interesting thing is that these are all a subset of all the symbols that Apple has. And you can see some of them here in the left sidebar, some of these little symbols that they use. 

Apple went also in the menus now on Mac West Tahoe has tons of these symbols and they're called SF symbols that Apple provides for developers to use in their apps. And there seems like there's a lot of them here that you can choose from. 

But it's actually only some. So like here's like a pie chart. You can see how this could be like a business folder here and you've got a pie chart or something. You know, this is a folder with conversations archived in it. 

This is a folder with sheet music, right? So there's a lot of things here. Clearly the designers went through their symbols and said, what are some good ones that people might want to use? Developers may want to use this, for instance. 

So yeah, there's a lot of cool stuff here. Now, if you put Pixar movies in the folder, you may want to use that, um, so lots of cool stuff you can do and it's an embossment there and if you add the color sometimes it makes it easier to see, uh, sometimes it makes it harder to see. I think it's easier there on yellow it wasn't great on red, uh, the blue makes it harder, the green makes it pretty easy to see, so you can play with a gray that's not too bad. 

So yeah, you could play with all of this to do these. But what's really interesting is you can go beyond these, go to emoji. 

You've got that button here to go to emoji. So click on that. Now you could choose emoji characters and you can scroll through all of them and you know all these emoji characters. 

You know that you probably have to search through them because there's so many. But you know, you could do like just a smile face right there. And those stand out because they're a color. 

So they really stand out. I mean, I guess some colors more than others. Gray's okay. Red, not as good, orange, well, with the yellow, that one doesn't stand out, blue stands out nicely and stuff. 

So yeah, the emoji characters really stand out nicely. And you can use like all the animals, you can use all different faces, you know, for different things. 

And emoji characters are meant to evoke emotions. So there's a lot of cool things here that you can use that maybe fit into things either just for fun, you know, put a little ninja on a folder like that or they could tie into stuff like you know you can use this little uh graph emoji there for a business type folder, right? 

You've got uh, you know, beat to slice for something to do with food or whatever, so you've got lots of cool stuff. Um, that you could choose from and uh, I think this is where the strategy in because I think you could really do some interesting things here, but you have to think about it. 

Like you can't be just saying, well, why do I want to put a smiley face on the folder? Well, there's a lot of cool emoji characters that are here. If you use some, you could really do some interesting things. Like for instance, if you happen to work in something international, you scroll down enough, you'll come across a flag for every country. 

So you can simply apply these flags as needed. Like if you work in some sort of business where you've got different things for different countries, you deal with like seven different countries, you know, applying like the flag for each country to the folder could make a lot of sense. 

And you've got a folder that are a flag that represents every country. Also, I think there could be some interesting things having to do with the faces. Like you've got different emotions here. So let's go down here. I created this untitled folder. 

And let's say I've got three folders here. And let's say these were, you know, having to do with, you know, something with work, but you wanted to get across the fact that sometimes things are good. So you might want to search for happy and say, yeah, I'm going to put this as the happy folder and then sometimes things are kind of meh, um, and you've got like a neutral emotion face here somewhere that you could choose or well if you can yeah neutral like this one. 

And maybe this one is the character for sad. And you could do, you know, one of these like that. So you could use like a set like this when you've got to divide your stuff up and use these three like that. 

Maybe you're charged a customer service for a company and you've got to save your conversations with people. And this is like the people that like things, or maybe you're saving reviews for your online business. 

This is good. This is bad. This is stuff that falls in the middle. Now you can organize things a little bit by this. 

And, you know, these emoji characters look in list view. It's really hard to see them there, but you could always go into, let's see, view settings, view options for this folder here. 

And I could make the icons bigger, like that icon size. Now you can see with this view, I can clearly tell which one of these is which. So that's nice. 

You can also change the icon size here and the icon view to make these more useful. Let's look at some other ideas here. 

Instead of flags, this is the last thing we looked at here. You've got that. So say you've got colors, right? But did you know that there are emoji colors as well? 

So for instance, if I wanted to do, let's see, green, there of course are tons of emojis that are green, but there are things like, for the major colors, there's these green circles, right? So you can have another color there. 

And you can also go in and there's green squares. There's squares for all the major colors. And there's even hearts for the major colors. 

So you can, you know, do that purple. There's the purple heart, purple square, purple circle. So you can just, you're not even worried about what the shape is, what the character is. 

Just do a circle, square, heart, that kind of thing. Numbers, there are numbers here as well. 

So if I search for one from OGC, you've got these little squares here with a number in them and various other numbers, including the circled number here, like this one, like that. 

I don't like how it put it down further because it's like a small character, but like this one is pretty clear here. It comes out. So remember like these, like we could change these to one, two, three for priorities or something like that. 

And you've got a variety of different numbers here that you can choose from. I think you can even go higher. Let's see here. If we do emoji, obviously you can go to nine. We got that. 

I think, no, there's some Unicode characters, I think, that probably aren't listed here that actually are like the numbers above 10, but there is a 10, so you've got that. The clock though, there's clocks like this and you've got them for all of the different times. 

So six, you can see there's six o'clock, three, and there's three o'clock. So you can use these for things you need to get done. If you have a set of things you need to do at nine, at noon, and at three, you could use clocks on different folders to help you with this. 

So I think that's kind of a neat idea. Lots of ideas with that. It's just, you have to really search through the emoji, see what's here, see what you think may help you. 

Maybe animals, you know, you could use like, you know, memory techniques, right? So, you know, there's zebra with Z, gorilla for G, E for elephant, that kind of thing. And different people, you know, I know use those letters like that for memory. 

And so you could have folders that actually use animals to help you remember what it is, even if the animal is directly related to that. 

So some cool stuff. I've got some more. Let me take a look at the questions I've got here. 

Let's see here. So somebody mentioned using custom icons. So I could jump right to that. 

The custom icons. So this is something I was going to talk about a little later. Well, actually, I'll get to that in a minute. I'll show you how to use a completely custom icon if you want. Not emoji, not symbols, and not coloring the folder. 

But first, I want to talk about where this works. I'm going to go here. I've got current stuff is that clock emoji. That's good. Let's go and make this folder red. 

And let's go and customize it and put like, you know, let's see, a thumbs up on it like that. Okay. So where can you see this? 

Well, obviously you see it here in the Finder and you can see it here in ListView. You can see it here in ColumnView. GalleryView is going to show it down here. 

So we've got all the views of the Finder. But what if I searched? I searched for business here in this folder. Yes, Finder searches will show that. 

So now I can easily find what I want in a finder search. That's really cool. And that'll certainly help. 

Fortunately, it doesn't help for spotlight. We do a spotlight search and I search here for business. I should find this folder here or I'll do command and then two to search for the folder named business folders. 

And there it is. That's the one. But guess what it shows up as pale blue so for whatever reason a new spotlight is not showing these hopefully it's something apple fixes. 

I do command I, I could see this just fine if I do quick look so spacebar it shows me it just fine and if I do view and show view option um let's see show preview. You can see it shows me that just phoning. 

So in some cases it's there, in other cases it isn't. Spotlight's a real one that really hurts that it's not there because that's where you may want to actually see these. But it is nice to know that you could just do a regular finder search. 

I tend, even with the new spotlight, if I know I want to file, I go to the finder. I don't do the search with Spotlight. I always tell people to do it. 

And now we have another reason to actually do that because you can see the folders that you want to stand out. So, great. Let's go ahead and let me tell you about the biggest place it does work, though. 

The biggest place it does work is in iCloud. This is iCloud compatible, which is a big deal, which means that if you've got, say two Macs like I do. 

I've got a laptop and I've got the desktop. I will look now in, since I've got this in iCloud Drive, if I look on my other Mac, I will see this and I can change it there. And then the change will reflect it back. 

It's iCloud Syncy. And that works for iPad and iPhone too. And of course, iPad OS 26, iPhone OS or iOS 26. And you can do this all there as well. 

All you need to do is use the file, tap and hold, and then you can, you know, you get the color dots and the customized folder to be able to do it there. 

So this works across everything. It's iCloud compatible, which is amazing and one of the best features of this whole thing. 

However, what I'm going to show you next is not, because if you do want to have a custom icon, you still can. Matter of fact, I've got here in this folder, I have a, this is just a graphic here, just the MacMost logo. 

I'm going to copy it, and I've got this folder here. I'm going to do Command-I, and this has been around for more than a decade. Once I do Command-I, I can click here. 

I can do Command-V to paste what I copied, and it changes the icon for this folder. This is still a folder. I can still go into it, but the icon has now been changed to be that custom graphic. 

That still works. So you still do have the ability to do that. Apple has not taken that away, replaced it with this. 

So the idea here is that you could still use it, but the catch is it still doesn't work over iCloud. It never worked over iCloud before. It doesn't work over iCloud now. 

So you're not going to see it on your other Macs. You're not going to see it on iPhone. You're not going to see it on iPad. And I think that the new functionality, it's even more true that Apple's never going to add that. 

They've got this new functionality. That's what they want you to use. But it was nice they left us this functionality here. 

I can select this and hit delete, and it returns to the default folder there. So you still do have that. 

So let me see here. So yes, this is a good question, and it leads me into the last thing I really want to talk about, which is the fact that somebody asks, are there letters? Can you do letters? 

And there are letters under emoji that you can do. So let me show you. This is not what I mean to show, but I'm going to do customize folder. 

And if I were to say, yeah, sign emoji and search for A, you find like all these different versions of A with like accent marks or they're slightly different font stuff, and you've got a circle day, and you've got a square day, and stuff like that. 

And you could certainly use one of these and assign an A to the folder. So that's fine. But I have a tip for you that I know hardly anybody else has talked about, or nobody actually, as far as I know, has talked about. 

And that is the ability to assign anything you want to this, including regular letters numbers and multiple ones. So to do that, you got to go into terminal. 

And I am going to do it for, all right, terminal window to be able to do it for some of these folders here. I'm going to go in, I've got a few things here in the buffer. First, I'm going to show you how to set a custom symbol. 

So you've got this thing called XATTR, X attribute. So you can go ahead and set the attributes of a file, dash W right. And the attribute is com.apple.icon.folders, pound S or hash S in quotes, and then quote, then curly bracket left, you know, back slash quote, sim for symbol, backslash quote, colon, backslash quote, figure.strength.training.traditional.circle.fill. 

What is that? That is a symbol that is not included in the list. And then I'm going to apply that to the demo folder here, this folder. Now, it's only going to work if first I customize the folder and add something to it. 

So basically enable the folder to use one of these. Now, if I issue this, you could see it uses this symbol, the one I selected here. 

We're going to get figure.strength.training.traditional.circle.fill. Well, I got it from the SF symbols app, which gives you access, developer access to all the different symbols. 

So I can look through here and see all these different symbols and decide that I want to use one that is not included in Apple's list. 

That's something that's really obviously not. Let's do, I don't know if the sailboat.fill is or not, but let me try sailboat.fill and I'll just erase all of this and change it to sailboat.fill. 

And when I press return, you can see it changes it to sailboat, right like that. 

So you can get the SF fonts or SF symbols at developer.apple.com slash SF dash symbols. You don't need a developer account to download it. 

It's just a free app. And then you can go and search through it to find cool symbols and use this terminal command here to apply any symbol to it. 

And yes, I did test it. It works on the iPhone too. Like when I do it here, then on the iPhone, I see the symbol. 

Now there's another one you can do. Instead of SYM, you could do emoji and then you could apply emoji characters or actually any character you want. 

If I do X, it applies. Oh, and it's doing this to daily reports. So I have to enable daily reports. 

I'll turn this one on here. There like that. And I'll do it again. And now you can see it uses X. 

I could do a regular emoji character. So I will bring up the emoji special character viewer. 

And I will just use, you know, I don't know, the barbershop whole thing and do it. You can see. 

So it's a way in terminal for me to assign it, which means since I can use it in terminal, I can use it in shortcuts. You can use it in cell scripts. 

You can use it in automator, whatever you want, which is cool. But here is what's even cooler. 

I can do more than one character. So I can do like Apple Watch and telephone and apply. 

And there you go. It put both of them there two symbols I could do it again and I could just type letters so abc and guess what there it is abc and it actually will work you know to shrink to whatever you want so I could say you know a daily but since this is like the daily folder and you could see you know like that so that's kind of a hack and it seems to work like across the different devices and stuff so I'm thinking it's kind of supported but it's kind of a neat little hack that I wanted to end with here um so yeah and uh oh yeah that's a good point somebody pointed out the dock it doesn't work either. 

I talked about the places it does work the places it doesn't work and um yeah when you drag this down here to the dock uh it's underneath me here but uh yeah it's just there's nothing to see because it's a uh it's a regular blue folder you can't see it's hidden behind me but it's just regular blue trust me you can try it yourself so the dock is another place it doesn't work which is a shame because it'd be nice to have it working there. 

The custom icons do work. Another place it doesn't work is aliases. Like if I were to option or was it a shift or command option drag the business folder here, not only is the business folder alias just a regular folder, but I can't customize this. 

Like if I assign red to it, it's just a red, you know, dot. So it's, you can't customize aliases. You can, of course, aliases don't work on iCloud, come to think of it. 

So you can still use the thing where you paste your own here. I wonder if I do command I here, select this, command C, go to the alias and then click on it there and then command V to paste. 

Yeah, there you go. So since you're not using aliases across iCloud anyway, there's a workaround, I guess. And that's kind of like the ultimate hack right there. 

So yeah, cool. Well, I'm going to end with that right there. I hope people got some stuff out of this. Sorry for all the little mess ups there at the beginning. 

I'll post maybe a slightly edited version without all that to macmost.com later. And I'll also post at the macmost post, which will be up tomorrow because it takes a while for YouTube to process and stuff. 

I will post the terminal commands to some samples of those so you can copy and paste because I know there's a lot of backslashing and stuff done in there. So cool. I hope you found this useful. Thanks for watching.