How To Customize Folders In macOS Tahoe

Hi, this is Gary with MacMost.com. Let me show you how you can customized folders on your Mac using Colors, Symbols, and Emoji. 

A new feature in macOS Tahoe and beyond is the ability to change the color of a folder in the Finder in macOS and also add symbols or emoji characters to that folder. It will not only work on your Mac but on iCloud, it will show up on your other Macs, if you have any, and even on your iPad and iPhone as well.

For instance, here's my sample Documents folder. You can see it is filled with these standard blue folders. Now I know some people love having a grid of  completely identical folders like this. It makes it so easy to pick out exactly what you want, right? Well, if you don't like this and want a few folders to stand out you can now do it. Let's start with the Colors first. So, to assign a color to a folder what you're going to do is you are going to Tag that folder. Tags have been around for a long time and they have colors associated with them. What has changed in macOS Tahoe and beyond is that the first tag's color will be used as the color for the Folder Icon as well. Now, if you've never used Tags before don't worry too much about it. I promise it won't hurt and we're not actually going to use tags. We're just going to assign one tag to a folder. 

So, for instance, let's go to this folder here called Notes. Let's say we want this to be a different color to make it standout. So you're going to bring up the Context Menu, which you do by Control clicking, right clicking on a mouse, or a two-finger click on a trackpad. This brings up the Context Menu. Then there is a section under here with these colored circles. These circles are Tags. Now, you've got red, orange, blue, yellow, green, purple, and gray. These are the default tags. If you've never used tags before this is what you've got. Notice the name for each tag matches the color. So the tag red uses the red color. For Tags this isn't necessarily the case. You can create your own tag and assign one of these colors to it. The name can be anything you want. Like Work, or Personal, or Home, Vacation. That kind of thing. The assign blue, green, purple, whatever you want to those tags. But for the default tags they are simply tags with the color name that use the same color. 

I'm going to select the first one here, red. When I do notice two things. First, the folder changes to the red color. Also, notice the dot underneath next to the name. That dot indicates a tag has been applied to this folder and it's a tag with a red color. If I were to select the folder and then use Command i to bring up the Info Window about it, you would see in the Tags area here the red tag is applied. You can edit this list here. If I click here I can add more tags to it. You can have as many tags as you want applied to a single file. But I can also simply delete that tag, like that, and it removes the tag there and you can see the color is now gone as well as the tag. You can do the same thing in the Context Menu. I can assign the orange tag here. I can go back into the Context Menu and I can click on orange again to remove it. 

Now if you don't see all of the colors here it may be because you've used tags before and you've customized things. I'm going to go in the Finder here to Settings and you can see that I've got all of these colored tags. I even have one here I created called Work and I assigned the color orange to that tag. But that tag, if you apply to a folder, won't change the color. It's only these tags, red, orange, blue, yellow, green, purple, and gray. They will assign color to the folder. So, use these. Think of them as Red means assign the red color. Orange means assign the orange color. They are different than tags like Work, Home, Personal, Project A, Project B. That kind of thing. 

But also you have this area here where you have your default tags. The ones that you use the most to make it easy to assign tags to things. So you want to make sure these are all set to the colors. You can drag and drop into here or out of here and rearrange the order like I just did there. So, you want to have those setup with the colors so that when you look here you can easily pick the color that you want to assign to the folder. Note if you assign multiple colors the one most recently assigned, that's the one that is that's going to get the color for the folder there. If I move those around, like that, you can see the other one now gets it. 

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So now let's look at the other way you can customize folders. That's by assigning a symbol or an emoji character to the folder. The way this works is you bring up the Context Menu, like before. If you'd rather not use the Context Menu you can also select the folder and then go to File and find Customize listed here as well. You'll see the colors are there too. So either way you do it, it's going to bring up this special control. Note that at the top you also have the colors. So this is another way to assign colors to the folders. Now you can assign one of these symbols here. It's going to imprint the symbol on the folder. So I'm going to choose the very first one here and notice how it imprints that symbol. I can change to another symbol and try out different ones to get the symbol I want. The way these look is very similar to how some of the default folders look. If I were to go to the Home folder here, note that Downloads, Applications,  Movies, Music, Pictures, and so on, they've had symbols like this on them for awhile now. The difference here is now we can apply them to our folders as well. 

So you can get really creative with how you use these symbols. For instance, under Food & Drinks here you might want to use this fork and knife, or perhaps this frying pan to indicate that this is a folder filled with recipes that you've clipped as PDF files. Under Travel & Places you've got icons for things like cars. You may want to indicate that you've got files in here with documents pertaining to your car, or maybe the little house here for things that have to do with maintaining your home. So if you have a folder that has information pertaining to say one of your pets, you can go to Animals in Nature and there's cat and dog and other animals here. But also you can go down to the Objects Section and there's a little Vet medical bag there as well. If you've got Sheet Music, say, you can maybe use these piano keys here. But also, you can go down to Symbols and there are a few different musical notes that you can choose from. Also under Objects, if you're say an artist, you may want to collect your artwork in a folder using an icon like this pallet here, or for your favorite artwork you may want to use a symbol like this, or fireworks. For artwork that didn't turn out so well maybe something like that. After experimenting you've decided you don't want an icon on this you can use the Clear button at the bottom to Clear it away. 

Now one of the problems with the Symbols is that they're just kind of a little imprint on the folder. They are really subtle. So if you want a better way to have a folder standout you may want to use an emoji character instead. An emoji character has the advantage of being full color. There are a ton of them to choose from. To do this all you need to do is go down to the bottom here, next to the Clear button there's an emoji button. Click that and it brings up the Emoji & Special Character chooser. You may be familiar with this for using it in other apps like Messages and Pages and so forth. So, you've got your Favorites here at the top and you can scroll through all these different characters. There's tons of them. Tons of different people with professions. Tons of different symbols. Some classic emojis. Some new emoji characters. Lots of stuff that you can use and they are very colorful. So if you pick one, like this dolphin here, it will standout, maybe not so much against that blue folder there but maybe this dog might standout even better. 

There are so many to choose from that instead of just scrolling through it, you probably just want to Search. So, for instance, if you have a folder that has business files in it you may want to Search for business things and come up with stuff like that, or charts or finance or money, and just see what comes up. Sometimes an obvious symbol won't come up with the search term. You need to keep trying different terms to see what will appear because the search terms are just looking at the names for these characters and sometimes a few other words that Apple has associated with them. If you go down far enough you'll find flags for all of the different countries. So planning a trip just assign a flag of the country you're going to a folder. Also, below this you're going to find lots of other standard symbols that are even older than emoji characters. Some of these may workout really well. Notice how the black lines of the text actually changes to that same kind of imprint color that you saw with the symbols. So you've got an imprint of this symbol here and if I were to change the color you can see the imprint goes with it. 

Now, as I mentioned before, this works across all of your Apple devices as long as they are all updated to the '26 versions like iPad OS 26 and iOS 26. So, for instance, here you can see the icons and how I've set them up in the Finder on my Mac. Here's my iPhone in the Files App in the same location on iCloud Drive. You can see all of the same stuff is there. If I were to tap and hold a folder, like this one here, you can see I have the ability to customize the color and tags here as well. So let me set the tag for this one to red and then I'm going to select a symbol there. Then Okay and it will update here in my Files App and then will also show up in a few seconds on my Mac, like that. Then I can go on my Mac here and decide to further change that, change it to yellow and use this one instead, and that will update then on my iPhone in the Files App there. 

Now this is still the very first version of macOS that has this feature. So there are some places where this works and some places where this doesn't. For instance, if I were to make an alias of this folder here just by using the Context Menu, you can see the alias does not have the same look as the original and I can't change the color or even have an option to change the symbol for the alias. It doesn't work in the Dock either. If I drag this to the right side of the Dock, add it here, and then change it to display this folder, I'm just going to get the standard blue folder. It doesn't work in the Finder Sidebar. If I drag this to the Finder Sidebar under Favorites you see I get the standard symbol there. You wouldn't expect there to be a symbol representation of the purple folder anyway. It doesn't work in Spotlight. So if I were to search for the folder called Daily Reports here in Spotlight, and you can see it comes up here, that's the folder. But it doesn't show the color and symbol there. Which is a shame because it would be nice to be able to pick it out from the results. 

But it does work with Quick Look. If I select the folder here and hit the Spacebar you can see the Quick Look preview of the folder actually shows the color and the emoji character in this case. Other places it does work is if you hold the Command Key down and drag to Add To the Finder Toolbar you can see it works there. It works in Finder searches as well. So if you're not using Spotlight Menu with Command Space, you just search here in the Finder and I'll just search in this folder here. You can see that just for file names you can see Daily Reports does actually have the color and the little icon that's on there. But note if you Control Click, right click, or two-finger click on a Search result here you can't actually customize the symbol or emoji. You can select a new color though if one is not already assigned. I can remove the color like that. 

So I expect Apple to maybe workout at least some of these in the future so it works in more places. 

Now previous to macOS Tahoe you customized folders by pasting a new icon over the old one. You can still do that. That still works. So, for instance, I'll go here into this folder. I've got an image file right here. I'll double click to open it up in Preview, Command A to select All, Command C to Copy. So I'm making sure I'm copying the pixels. You can do it other ways but this is the cleanest way to do it. Then I go to a folder, like say this one here. Use Command i to get Info. Select the icon and Command V to paste that image. That's how it worked before. That's how it still works. But note that it still has the same restriction that it had before. It doesn't work across to other devices. So this is in iCloud Drive. On other devices this is just going to appear as a regular folder. It's only on this Mac that I get this custom icon. 

You can still use your own folder graphics. Pictures you've taken of objects or your dog or whatever you like for folder icons if you want. Hope you found this useful. Thanks for watching.