Of course, it’s easy to swap icons around using the trick above. With all that in mind we are going to look at changing an icon on the Mac. Changing icons is a neat OS X trick to know, but you will rarely improve the Mac experience by changing icons around.

Icons are metaphors that represent items, actions and concepts. You can double-click to open it, and even drag the Untitled text document into the folder. The “Untitled Folder” is still a folder.Open a Finder window and all other folders will have the regular icon. You haven’t changed all folder icons, just that specific icon for that folder.You’ve just changed its icon! Here are some things to note:

Now highlight the icon in the folder’s info window and choose Edit > Paste.Īs you do this you’ll see the folder on the desktop change from a folder graphic to a text document graphic.

Click the small icon graphic in the text document’s Info window. Each has a small graphical preview of its icon at the top of the Info window. Now select the file and choose File > Get Info. Select the folder and choose File > Get Info (Command-I) to open its Info window.

You should now have a folder called “Untitled Folder” and a file named “Untitled” on the desktop.

Open Text Edit and choose File > New then File > Save.

It’s better to start out with these disposable items rather than jumping straight into editing app icons. To test this out we are going to create an empty folder on the desktop, but give it an icon from a blank text document. These icons can be cut and pasted from one item in Mac OS X to another.

Mac icons download free