One of the best ways to customize your Mac and make it your own is to change your app and folder icons. With just a few simple changes, you can have things uniquely your own.
Folder Icon Maker is a Shareware icon utility tool that can be used to combine Mac OS X Finder icons. To use the program, simply drop an icon for the backdrop onto the view in the upper left. I have a new iMac OSX (Lion). I want to change the folder icons (for the hard drive, aliases etc.) to my own image. Going to “get info” and cutting and pasting the image I want to use does NOT work for me. When I “get info” on an image, the upper left corner does not reveal the image, just. Sep 15, 2018 How to Create New Folders in Launchpad on a Mac. One of the newer features included in Mac OS X Lion is Launchpad, an application management system with a similar appearance to the iPhone and iPad home screen. Click the Launchpad icon. This can be found in your dock and is a silver icon with a rocket ship. Create a new folder. It works like a charm to change the Finder icon in Mac OS X Lion. LiteIcon is a simple app which allows you to change your system icons quickly and easily. Simply drag an icon onto the one you want to change, and click the Apply Changes button. I set my folder's icon image in OS X Leopard before, but I don't know how to do that in Lion. In Leopard you simply copy the icon image from an Info window of a file, and paste that into the folder's icon image in the top left corner of its Info window.
There are a lot of different icons you can change in OS X. The easiest ones to change are your applications and folders but, we warn you, it can be habit forming. Once you start customizing, you may not want to stop!
Do a simple search for “os x icons” and you’ll see there are a lot of websites where you can download icons and icon packs. In fact, this is how we find the majority of our replacement icons, but it’s good to understand that you can basically use any picture as an icon. Let’s show you what we mean.
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Here’s our desktop, pristine and largely untouched. We want to use it as our Desktop folder icon, so we’ll go ahead and take a screenshot (“Command + Shift + 3”) of the whole thing. Then, open the new screenshot image in Preview and copy it to the clipboard (“Command + C”).
The Desktop is a folder, so its icon can be changed. Here it sits among the rest of the special folders in our Home Folder, which you can access from the Go menu or by pressing “Shift + Command + H” in Finder.
Select the item, in this case our Desktop folder, and either right-click and select “Get Info” or more easily, use “Command + I” to open that item’s information panel. Click the icon in the upper-left corner so that it has a blue border around it.
Now, simply paste the clipboard contents by pressing “Command + V” and your Desktop’s folder icon will be changed.
You can go through and change any or all of these folders, which will then be reflected throughout the system in titlebars and even in your sidebar’s favorites if you want to use color icons instead of OS X’s default gray ones.
Application Icons
It’s not just folder icons, however, you can change application icons as well using the same method. Remember, you can use any picture, so if it can be opened in Preview, it can be copied and probably used as an icon.
That said, you will run into various images and formats along the way, many of which may not be ideal as an icon. Most nice looking icons are usually in .png format with a transparent background. You can also find icon files that have the extension .icns, which is an Apple icon library file.
Let’s show you an example of what we mean and how to use .icns files. We want to change our Safari icon, not too drastically, just to something flat.
We have a Safari .icns file that we found on a website and it seem to suit our needs perfectly. We open it with Preview and see it has quite a few icons contained within it, so which one do we use? You actually don’t need to choose one, simply select them all with “Command + A” and then copy using “Command + C”.
Here’s our Safari info, which we find by opening our Applications folder (“Shift + Command + A” in Finder or from the Go menu), clicking on it and then using “Command + I” (or right-click “Get Info”).
Again, just like with our folders, click the little icon in the upper-left corner so it has a blue border around it and then paste (“Command + V”) the clipboard’s contents.
You will be prompted to enter your user password to change an application’s icon, but once you do, your new icon will be used instead of the old. If you want to see this reflected in the Dock, simply start or restart the application.
You can change your icons to virtually anything you want. If it turns out you don’t like it, you can use a different one. If you want to revert to the default icon, simply open the info panel, click on the icon as if you’re going to replace it, and hit the “Delete” key instead. Enter your password if necessary, and your icon will be changed back.
Those are the basics of icon customization in OS X. If you enjoy searching the Internet for OS X icons, or even creating your own, then it is sure to keep you busy for a long time.
If you have anything you’d like to add such as a question or comment, we welcome your feedback in our discussion forum.
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I have a new iMac OSX (Lion). I want to change the folder icons (for the hard drive, aliases etc.) to my own image. Going to “get info” and cutting and pasting the image I want to use does NOT work for me.
When I “get info” on an image, the upper left corner does not reveal the image, just the generic image of jpg or pdf (I CAN see the real image in the preview part of “get info”). When I paste, it just puts the same generic image of jpg or pdf.
Seems my problem would be solved if I knew how to get the actual image to appear in the upper left corner… Any advice?
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