Have you ever wondered how to change icons in OS X? It’s actually pretty easy. Here’s how:
Do a get info on the application, item or folder you would like to change the default icon on by pressing command + i. For demonstration, I’m changing the icon on my jump drive. You should get a window that looks like this:
Then you want to click the icon in the top left of this box, highlighted below:
Notice that the folder icon is highlighted now. Once the icon is highlighted, leave the get info dialog box open and go find the icon you want to use. Press command + c (to copy), then, click back to your get info dialog box that we left open for item you intend to change and press command + v (to paste). I chose to replace my icon with a usb icon so now when I plug in my flash drive, it shows that it is an external usb drive, like so:
You can use a premade icon from a site like: InterfaceLIFT like I did, or you can create your own. There are tons of icon sets on the internet. If you chose to create your own, the OS prefers the graphic to be 256 pixels x256 pixels for Panther and Tiger and 512×512 for Leopard. Just create your graphic and save as a .png or .ico file and copy and paste in.
Filed under: Apple, technology
[...] back to default in Max OS X Posted on January 30, 2009 by Brian Harrison In a recent post here I showed you how to change your Max OS X icons to basically any picture or icon that you wanted. [...]
Heya Brian, i followed this guide but when i cmd+v my PNG image into the highlighted icon on my USB drive, it appears as a pieve of paper with JPG on it… any ideas? Thanks in advance
Hey Serge, couple of questions, did you make it 256×256? Is your png image showing a jpg icon in finder? If so, try doing a save as > png in photoshop and try pasting it in again. If you can’t get it to work, send it to me and I will figure it out.
Thanks for reading!
I have the same problem as Serge Pascal when I paste it appears as a piece of paper with the JPG text on it. Can you please help?
Joel
Hi Joel! Thanks for reading. In photoshop, try changing your color mode from rgb to index and see if that helps. If you can’t get it to work, just attach the graphic to an email and email it to me from my google profile. Let me know how it turns out!
Hey Joel- check your email.
Thanks!
I am trying to paste a jpeg photo as a CD drive icon. I can not get it to work in os 10.5.7.
can you help me?
thanks!
Hi John, a jpeg won’t work. You have to convert it to a .png in photoshop for it to work. File>save as>file type>png. In 10.5 you can save it as a 512×512 image. Good luck!
thanks. I will try that!