Hi this is Gary with MacMost.com. Today let me show you how to create custom
icons to use for folders on your Mac. MacMost is brought to you thanks to a great
group of more than 500 supporters. Go to MacMost.com/patreon. There you can read more about it, join us,
and get exclusive content. 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.
