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Faking Folders Icon

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Actually, the outcome of this trick won't give you any great significance to your skill in using Mac. What I intended here is to share several useful tricks and wrap them up in a fun way. I hope in such a way, you can memorize them better.

For a teaser, let's see the outcome for this fun tip:

The Outcome

As I've said previously, the outcome is less important than what you will get during the process. As Steve Jobs said, "The Journey is the Reward".

Let's get started.

1. Detect Location

Dock is separated into two portions, which the first one can contains applications and the other one can only contains folders. Here, you will be guided to mirror applications and folders. To get things quickly done, it will be best to change the folder's display rather than another way round.

As you cannot access the file information directly from the Dock, it's essential to know where is the file location.

  1. Control-Click on the folder/application
  2. Choose Show in Finder from popped up contextual menu
  3. New Finder window pointed to that item will pop up

2. Grab Applications Icon

Once you've mastered the first step, you can do this part easily. To complete this part, you will be required to perform several steps:

  1. Detect Location of Application
  2. Hit keystrokes Command-C (copy)
  3. The copy of your application icon will be kept in clipboard

3. Change Folder Icon

So now, you will have the icon (virtually) stored in your Mac clipboard. Grab one of your Dock folders and to these steps:

  1. Detect Location of Folder
  2. Open its Info Pane (keystrokes: Command-I)
  3. Click on its icon representation hanging on top-left corner of the pane
  4. Paste the icon from clipboard to replace current icon (keystrokes: Command-V
  5. The icon has been changed (actually, it's covered by another layer of icon)

Up to this point, your folder icon is already changed, but sometimes you will see no changes on your Dock icon. It's just nothing happened. If that happens, proceed to next step.

4. Display Folder Icon on Dock

After upgrading to Leopard, you will have your Dock empowered with two icon display modes: Display as Stack and Display as Folder. If you use Display as Stack, three top items inside the folder will be displayed in stacking manner.

However, this will ruin our plan to fake our applications and folders, so we will stick to using Display as Folder. Your folder now will perfectly display new icon.

Follow the steps and map the applications icon to the folder, then you will reach a mirrored state like shown before.

5. Revert Back to Original Icon

Let's say you just want to have fun with it (not going to keep it for long time), you can easily rip off the new overlaying icon leaving alone the old one:

  1. Detect Folder Location
  2. Open its Info Pane (keystrokes: Command-I)
  3. Select the small thumbnail icon view and press Delete
  4. Overlaying icons will be deleted and original icon will still be there

Last Words

After reading this article, I hope you've mastered five new techniques of your Mac:

  1. Detect Folder Location
  2. Grab Applications Icon
  3. Change Folder Icon
  4. Display Folder Icon on Dock
  5. Revert Back to Original Icon

If you feel some of the steps are confusing, feel free to ask (politely) on the comment box below. I will try my best to guide you through.

Categories: Tips and Tricks
Tags: Fake, Folder, Icon, Mac

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16 Comments

Frankie62 

Thanks for the tip! now my videos stack is an quicktime icon and my downloads a finder one!

Jer E 

I tried using this to change my "Finder" application icon, but it didn't work!
Is there a trick to change an application's icon?

Wendy 

There should be a way to achieve that, I will try to find that before I get back to you. :)

213 

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NaVi 

I have read many articles on your website lately, and I must say I really love this kind of little tricks. Well, in fact, almost every thread i have read has been useful to me in one way or another :p  Great site and continue posting articles!!

Nelson Piper 

I used this to change a few of my folders and think that this is an awesome trick.  The one I am having trouble with is I would like to change movie icons.  Right now on leopard it always gives you the option to play the movie right there on the preview, but what i want is to put a picture there instead and it won't let me do that.  Any Ideas?

Thanks so much

Linux Geek 

"Jer E" there is a way to do that, but you have to find Finder in Finder, right click (or control click) on Finder.app select Show Package Contents.  Go through the folders until you find a file called info.plist, open it and look for the section where it says the iconfile or something like that.  Change it to the exact file path and save it.

thomas sabo 

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austin home builder 

Folder icon makes the folder beautiful. I have used several folder icon software and their utilities are so much easy to use. They are free of cost too. You can also buy the premium version at less payment.

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