How To Create Custom Folder And Drive Icons For Your Mac

You can create custom folder icons by using only the software that comes with your Mac. By taking the existing folder icon graphic and bringing it into Preview, you can tint the color and then add text, emoji or shapes to create a useful custom folder icon. Changing folder icons can be a little tricky and buggy, however. You can also use graphics apps to create more highly-customized icons and download icons online to use.

You can also watch this video at YouTube (but with ads).

Video Transcript: Hi this is Gary with MacMost.com. Today let me show you how to create custom icons to use for folders on your Mac. 
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So if you have a bunch of folders on your desktop or in your Documents folder you may want to customize the icons. That way you can easily pick out each folder and know what's inside. Here I have a bunch of folders on my desktop and they're using the standard blue folder icon from macOS. What I would like to do is have custom icons for all of those. Now you can create your own custom icons using just the apps you have on your Mac. You can also use an Image Editor if you've got one. I'm going to talk more about that later on. For now let's just use what's built into our Mac which is the Preview app. You can do a lot with just the Preview app to customize these folders.
So let's start with this Writing folder. Now to get the icon for it, so we can edit it, I want to select it and then I can go to File, and then Get Info which is Command i. Now I'm going to select the icon here at the top left and do Edit, Copy. I could also have just selected the folder, not brought up the Get Info window, and do Command C on the folder itself. Both would work for what we are about to do next which is to go to the Preview app, I'm going to launch it with Spotlight, Command Space, Preview, and then hit Return. I'm going to do File, New From Clipboard.
Now since I copied the icon, the icon is in the Clipboard, and it's going to create an Icon's file here with the folder and all the different sizes that the icon appears. So from highest resolution to lowest. If I had copied just the folder itself and done the same thing Preview is smart enough to know that it can't do anything with the folder but it can do something with the folder icon. It would have created the same Icon's file for us. Now I can't do much here with this Icon's file unless I want to change all of these and I don't. I just want to change the highest resolution version. So what I'm going to do is make sure it is selected  and I'm going to Copy again and then I'm going to close this file. I haven't saved it so I'm going to just hit the Delete button to delete it so it's gone. But now when I do New From Clipboard, just like before, I just have what I copied which is the highest resolution version of that icon. This is a standard image file now.
So now I can Edit it. I would have liked to set the color for this folder. Instead of blue make it red, green, orange, whatever I want. Unfortunately you can't really do that in Preview. But you can modify the color a little bit. Click on the Markup Tool there and then the Prism Tool. Then you have Adjust Color. There are a few things I can do here. One is I can change the Tint. I can make it more purple or green. I can also do things like the Saturation and Temperature and even Sepia to go kind of with a tan or yellowish view. So you can play with all of these to try to change the color.
Once you have the color you want to use now let's have some sort of interesting graphic on it. Now I can draw a graphic on it using one of these pen tools here. I can click the Pen, I can click the Line Size, click the color of the line and I could then draw on it. But instead I'm going to use a symbol. You can get a lot of symbols just by typing text. So I'm going to click on the Text box there. I have some text. I can just type something so you know you can type some letters that represent the folder. I can choose a different font here. There's tons of fonts I can choose from. But I could also choose an emoji which means I have tons of symbols at my disposal. 
So I'm going to use Command Control Space and go to the Emoji viewer. I'm going to choose something that represents writing since this is my writing folder. So I'll search for writing. There's a bunch of different things here. Let's choose this first one here and now I've got a nice little graphic. Chances are when you do this the first time it's going to be a lot smaller. So you want to select the text, go to font here, and change it to something big like 500 point. I can move this around. Position it where I want. I can click the selection tool there if you don't already have it selected. Select outside of everything. Do Command A to select all and Command C to copy. 
Now I can apply this to the folder. I don't even have to Save this file. But if I wanted to save it for later use I can do File, Save and then I can select png as a good format. Make sure you have Alpha selected so it's semi transparent. Then you could save that out as a file to use later on. But I'm not going to save this one out. I'm going to click on the writing folder here. Do Command i again. Click on the folder icon. Do Command V to paste. This will paste that icon there complete with that symbol. So now I have a nice folder for this.
Let's do the same thing for Travel here. I'm going to go back in and I'm going to hit Undo a bunch of times. So Command Z to go all the way back to the original blue folder there. Let's hit the Prism again and make some changes. Maybe make this a more purple kind of folder. I'm going to do some text. Select text there, delete it, and do Control Command Space. Then I'm going to select an icon. Let's do this globe here for the travel folder. Then I'm going to move this so it's centered right there. Then I'm going to do Command A and Command C. Select the travel folder, Command i there, and Command V to paste it in.  So now I have a unique folder there for travel.
For Business I want to do something a little different. Maybe instead of using an emoji I want to have a shape. But maybe one of those shapes from Pages, Numbers, and Keynote. You go into Pages and you click on Shape you've got a whole bunch of different shapes to choose from starting off with the basic ones. But you can go to all sorts of different ones like symbols and people and science. All sorts of things. You can go to Work here and you can see a variety of different shapes that could represent business. So let's use this little organizational chart here. I'm going to click on it and it inserts it in. Now I want to enlarge it because the larger I make it the better it will look inside of the icon. Once it's pretty big on the Pages document I'm going to do Command C to copy it. I don't care about this Pages document anymore. I can just Quit out of Pages. I'm not going to save it. I'm going to Command V to paste it in here. You can see now I've got this organizational chart in here. 
I could have, in Pages, changed it to a different color or added a border to it for instance. I could do all sorts of different things. Whatever it looks like here when I copied and pasted it, it would look like here. I'm going to leave it like this. I'm going to select outside. Do Command A and Command C. Select the business folder, Command i, and Command V to paste it in. Now I've got that. 
Another way to go is to use an existing icon to represent a folder. This is common if you have a folder that's filled with documents created by the same app. Like this Spreadsheet folder. It's going to be filled with documents created in Numbers. I'm going to go into the Finder here and create a new finder window. Do Go and Applications. Find Numbers and do Command i on that. Select the icon for Numbers and do Command C to copy. Close that out. Go back in here and do Command V. Now I've pasted the Numbers icon there. So now I'll center it there. Click outside. Do Command A to select All. Command C. Select the Spreadsheet folder Command i. Select the icon Command V. Now I've got a folder that has the Numbers app icon on the folder. It's kind of neat and it's easy to see what's going to be inside that folder.
Now there's a couple of problems here you should know about. The main one is that you can't do this more than once. That's right! Once you change a folder icon all you can do is remove it or use the new custom icon. It's a bug. Let me show you here. Let me go to this business folder. I still have, in the copy buffer, the Numbers app icon. So I'm going to select Command i for the business folder here. I'm going to select the icon and I'm going to paste on it and nothing. You could see I am stuck with that look there for the icon. I can hit the Delete key and get rid of it. You can see now I've got no icon there. But if I try to paste that Numbers icon there again you can see that it appears there for a second and then it went away. This is a bug. Hopefully Apple fixes it at some point. Until then if you do really want to change it a second time what you would need to do is create a new folder. Take this new folder. Set that to be the icon that you want. Then go into this folder and move all the items from this folder into this folder and delete the original folder. 
You could also do this with the Drives on your Desktop. So I can select a drive here. Do Command i. I can click on the icon and do Command V to paste. It's going to prompt me for my password in order to do this. When I hit Return now I've got that icon there. Actually if you're doing this for a hard drive icon you probably don't want to start with that folder image first. You probably want to either create something from scratch or start with the hard drive icon and draw on top of that. 
Now it's a lot easier to create unique icons or icons from scratch if you use an Image Editing app. For instance you can use Acorn to do this. You can get Acorn in the Mac App Store. I'm going to do a video on how to create custom icons in Acorn. Another app that you could use is Pixelmator Pro. I'll do a video on how to use Pixelmator Pro to create custom icons as well. Also you could just look online and find custom icons already pre-made. So you can find these in different collections or just do image searches. I'm going to do a video on using that technique as well.

There are three add-on tutorials that I made that go along with this video. They are all at YouTube:
How To Create Custom Folder Icons With Acorn
How To Create Custom Folder Icons With Pixelmator Pro
How To Find and Use Custom Folder Icons Online

Comments: 15 Responses to “How To Create Custom Folder And Drive Icons For Your Mac”

Edward Glinski

5 years ago

This is great. I believe you did this video a couple of years ago. Perhaps using images from the web or photos will be forthcoming as opposed to pages images and images.

Gary Rosenzweig

Edward: Look at the three other videos I released today (listed above). The last one deals with that.

Ian MacGregor

Gary: I've been able to reproduce this tutorial in GIMP, thank you so much for your work! Changing a folder icon in the iCloud Drive folder of my MacBook Air doesn't seem to allow the icon to propagate across iCloud - the new custom icon doesn't show up in the Files app on my iPad or iPhone. Is this normal.. or am I doing something wrong? Is this folder icon change only a Mac thing?

Ian: Looks like iCloud doesn't support this. Neither does iOS since there is no way to do this on iOS.

Mace

Great tip. I've collected a lot of clip art. They're stored in folders by theme -- holidays, cities, tools, etc. Now I can grab a representative image from within each folder and change the folder icon in indicate what the theme is. It makes searching for graphics much easier.

edward

I was able to attach an image on to a folder following your directions. When I email a folder with an image superimposed, the sent feature in mail does not show the image. I also do not if the receiver received the folder with the image superimposed.

edward: No, sending a folder won't carry that image with it. That is a customization for you on your Mac alone.

Lindy

Regarding sending folders with a personalized icon...would it help to compress the file first? And was it sent to another Mac owner? !!
Thanks for another great video Gary.

Lindy: I don't think so. But test it out and see.

John Westby

Thanks for the video, but I can’t get icons to paste onto the drive symbol. I have icons from g-technology on the clipboard but they won’t paste in (OS 10.15.2) Thanks

John: Is this an external drive? Is it not formatted for macOS?

Thanks Gary. Yes it’s an external drive which is supplied formatted for Mac and the drive is working fine. Thanks John

John: Not sure what the issue could be then. Must be something different about it if it won't let you customize the icon. Maybe try a restart and see if it works then?

Thanks Gary. I will try that. John

Andrew Hatheway

Didn't work for me. When I created text box it only allowed me to resize the box left or right, not diagonally so the icon I click was very very small. (Catalina)

Comments Closed.

How To Create Custom Folder And Drive Icons For Your Mac

Comments: 15 Responses to “How To Create Custom Folder And Drive Icons For Your Mac”

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