You can also search for specific types of icons, like “books folder icon”, as I’ll show in a moment.Īdd a few of these images to your Desktop. So many cool alternatives! For any of these that catch your eye, a click brings up a larger image (still in Image Search), which you can then easily drag and drop onto your Desktop. For example, here are some of the search results for the query “mac folder icon”: I find that Bing Image Search actually does a better job with this than Google. The easiest way to dig up cool alternative icons is to use an image search capability. Now let’s see what we can do with this hidden MacOS capability… FINDING CUSTOM ICONS ONLINE This demonstrates the basics of updating folder icons – and file icons too, as it happens – by using Get Info. I’ve just fixed the folder icon for my ‘caricatures’ folder, as the Finder shows: Now open up Get Info for the folder with the wrong icon…Ĭlick on the icon, then use Edit > Paste to update the icon to the image in the clipboard. You’ve copied the scalable graphic into the clipboard.

In fact, click on it (it’ll get a very subtle halo highlight) then choose Edit > Copy. What’s not at all obvious is that the actual icon shown in this Get Info view is editable. To fix this one, simply use File > Get Info to open up the Get Info window for a folder with the desired icon. But as a first step, it can be fixed by using the same basic process that allows custom icons too. Why is “caricatures” different to the others? I have no idea. In my Documents folder, for example, I have these: What I have found as a long-time Mac user is that sometimes folders end up with incorrect icons, often due to their origin as part of an app distribution or similar. Save some great options to your Desktop and you can try ’em out as alternatives to the regular old folder icon… BORING FOLDER ICONS, ONE RETRO The fun, first step is that you’ll want to be poking around in Image Search, either through Google or Bing, and finding some good graphics that fit the bill images that generally have a transparent background (denoted by a checkerboard pattern, but we’ll come back to that). Shortcuts: Fix Incorrect Folder Icons | Find New Icon Images | Customize Folder Icons Fortunately, the Finder in the most recent generation of MacOS – Ventura, MacOS 13 – seems to be quite flexible in the size and shape of custom icons, so while it’s a bit convoluted to change things, the results can be quite impressive. For a system that started out as “the computer for the rest of us” it’s surprising that Apple never released a utility that made the process of customizing icons – or even icon collections – easier. The Mac has supported custom folder and file icons for many years, but the process of changing them is entirely unintuitive.

Folder for mac icons