I'm on macOS Big Sur 11.1, and I wanted to use a different folder for my Safari downloads, so I created another directory and did

-s ~/Downloads

on it (symlinked). Everything works fine except for a small thing. In the Finder app, on the sidebar, this folder has a "standard folder" icon, even if it is recognized in the preferences as my Downloads folder (see the attached pictures). Is there any way to at least make the Finder think that folder as the original Downloads folder? Or maybe is there a way to manually change its icon? Please note that I already found some answers to my question on this site, but they seem to not to be compatible with Big Sur.

I have changed the Dock icon for an app and it shows the new icon only when the app is not open. But as soon as I open it, the old icon comes back. When I close the app, the new icon appears again. I have tried pinning an alias to the Dock, but the same thing happens. It shows correctly in other places, such as Finder and Launchpad. I have tried the following ways of changing the icon: - Copied the new image onto the info window. - Replaced the favicon.icns file in the package contents - Restarted the Dock and Finder several times - Cleared the icon cache by executing: rm /var/folders/*/*/*/com.apple.dock.iconcache;killall Dock I know the cache has updated because the icon for Pages, which I had uninstalled but hadn't unpinned from the Dock, changed to a question mark. The app is YouTube to MP3 by MediaHuman. How do I stop the icon from reverting? I am running macOS Sierra 10.12.6.

In the 2013 OS X Human Interface Guidelines, Apple wrote > As the canvas size decreases, you have fewer pixels to draw, which means that smaller sizes should be less detailed. For example, the smaller size Calendar app icon is not as detailed as the larger size, where you can see numbers for the days of the month, highlights in the metal rings P. 118 I’m looking for a comparison for more their icons; mail, safari, pages. I’ve only been able to find changes over years and not different versions in the same year.

If you 'right click' an icon on the dock > hover 'Options' > un-check "Keep in Dock" and proceed to drag the icon to move it, what happens is the "Keep in Dock" option becomes checked once again. This is annoying because I do not want closed applications to be on my dock, yet I want to be able to organize my dock when application are open. The issue was briefly mentioned in the comment section of this thread with no apparent solution. Is it possible to disable this behavior?

I am using a Mac Sonoma but the feature to drag the icon sitting in the center of the title bar of a window it's gone. The icon still shows and I can still click on the icon button. I can't drag it to drop the file out to a different location or an email. The display title in the settings and tried to line people suggested by it still doesn't work. Does anyone know how to reactivate this feature? Additionally doesn't even show the icon in the title bar at all. Any solutions ? Thank you!

I have a few NAS/UNRAID servers that I connected to from my macOS (Ventura) client over SMB, but I'm currently swapping over to NFS. From the command line, things are fine and work as expected. However, on my Desktop, the custom icons I had for the shares/volumes are gone (replaced with the default), and I can't seem to put them back using the technique outlined here , for example. I've tried ICNS & PNG files, and these worked just fine with SMB (and still do). Are custom Volume icons not supported for NFS?

On one of my MacBooks, a few iCloud folders have persistent iCloud status icons, even though there is no iCloud pie chart upload/download activity in the side bar. For example, they will show as being only in the cloud (i.e. cloud with down arrow) when they are definitely on my computer. Other folders have up and down arrows in the Finder Window Size column indicating something needs to be synced, but all the files in the folder are actually synced and have no incorrect cloud symbols. A few folders show the simple-line solid cloud icon which is normally only shown when iCloud status is clicked under View Options. On my other MacBook, everything is fine with no anomalous iCloud folder icons. Both computers are running Monterey 12.6 and have "Optimize Mac Storage" turned off. When I create/edit/delete files/folders, both inside and outside the anomalous folders, everything syncs fine between the computers. I have deleted the .DS_store files, checked for hidden files in the folders, rebooted the computer, run DiskUtility repair, but haven't found a solution. The only fix is to make a copy of the folder and after the copy syncs to iCloud, delete the original folder, and rename the copy to the original folder name. Unfortunately, this does not fix the problem for the enclosing folder(s), all of which still show the anomalous iCloud icon, so to ultimately fix all the anomalous folders at the top level requires hundreds of GB of syncing. This problem (and workaround solution) is similar to [iCloud Drive Preview folder shows persistent iCloud icon](https://apple.stackexchange.com/questions/427577/icloud-drive-preview-folder-shows-persistent-icloud-icon) , but is not specific to Preview. This is mostly just an irritation, but it does confuse me a bit when I am checking if an actual iCloud sync is complete. Is there some reset or cache clearance that could fix the problem when it occurs?

Can I insert an image or more than one image into a folder icon, (like overlaying the image onto the folder icon itself) so I can see some of the data that is in that folder before I click on it? I think I did this with Windows years ago and not sure which OS it was but can I do this in El Capitan and Yosemite?

I have just upgraded my Mac to macOS 14 Sonoma, and noticed a little icon appearing in text if I wait long enough. The icon looks like this: with the colour depending on the application. It only appears after a while (about 10 minutes), and disappears when the text loses focus. This is what it looks like in Notepad: I’ve also noticed a caps lock icon, but that’s pretty clear. So, what is it?

I come to MacOS from Windows, and I'm wondering if I can group minimized app icons just like Windows: - in the order of when the windows was created, instead changing their icon orders every time - group/consolidate minimized icons of the same app into one when there are too many of them, instead of occupying my dock space like this: I presume that it most likely doesn't exist, but I think it doesn't hurt to ask.

I want to increase the display size of desktop icons beyond the maximum 128x128. Is there a command I can use to do it? (macOS Mojave)

This iPhone I work with just lost all its favorite icons for the bookmarks on the new tab page. I have no idea what I did or how this came about. Is there a way to restore them without deleting and remaking each and every website I bookmarked? Notice how YouTube kept its icon as you see with the small red patch visible in the lower right corner area. Baffling why this would be inconsistent.

Setting up folder icons in macOS is a tedious process. which is "okay-ish" for small amount of folders but not feasible for large directories. is their a script or an app that can do this automatically? like this or this

Video showing the issue I have also tried clearing the current icon so it is back to default, then opening the new icon image in Preview, selecting all, copying, then clicking on the icon in the Get Info window, and Pasting... and it still shows the old custom icon.

I use Java and Wish and there are lots of instances opened. This makes it confusing when I want to switch between tasks. Is it possible to modify the icons that are shown by adding text to them? The Wish icon is just an empty rectangle. Can I somehow tell the app to set an Icon?

I am using Jorrick's MacOS notifications generator to make custom popup notifications. Whenever one appears, it uses the Python Launcher rocketship icon, like this: I want to replace the rocketship image with the System Settings gear icon. So, I followed Apple Insider's tutorial on how to do so, and succeeded. This method only works with images, not .icns files - maybe there's a lead there. I also deleted PythonLauncher.icns, the picture of the rocketship, made a .icns of the gear, and put it in the same directory with the same name, so hopefully the program would use that as the icon. Now, PythonLauncher.app uses the gear icon in several places, but annoyingly, still not the notification icon! 1. The Python I'm executing to make the notification. I run it with python3 notifgen.py from Terminal. 2. The gear.png icon is used in the Get Info window 3. The gear.png icon is used in Finder 4. The gear.png icon is used in the Dock 5. The .icns file I made to replace the rocketship. Changing this file does not change the previous three icons. 6. The notification, still using the rocketship icon, even though that icon does not exist anywhere on my system. I deleted all traces of it. To be sure I deleted all copies of the old rocketship icon, I ran sudo find / -iname '*PythonLauncher*' 2>/dev/null | tee ~/Documents/python/pythonlaunchersearch.txt. The ouput of that command is below - I added newlines and explanatory comments, and opened each file in Finder to check what it was.

#a directory which contains one directory, which is empty
/System/Volumes/Data/private/var/folders/68/kk888d5s1g99nsjkfvml43rm0000gp/C/org.python.PythonLauncher

#a text file
/System/Volumes/Data/Users/cn13431/Library/Application Support/com.apple.sharedfilelist/com.apple.LSSharedFileList.ApplicationRecentDocuments/org.python.pythonlauncher.sfl3

#the results of my find command, tee'd into a file
/System/Volumes/Data/Users/cn13431/Library/CloudStorage/OneDrive-[company name redacted]/Documents/python/pythonlaunchersearch.txt

#OneDrive junk
/System/Volumes/Data/Users/cn13431/Library/Group Containers/UBF8T346G9.OneDriveStandaloneSuite/OneDrive - [company name redacted].noindex/OneDrive - [company name redacted]/Documents/python/pythonlaunchersearch.txt

#a picture of the system settings gear icon that I renamed to PythonLauncher.icns to match the old image (the rocket)
/System/Volumes/Data/Applications/Python 3.13/Python Launcher.app/Contents/Resources/PythonLauncher.icns

#a directory which contains one directory, which is empty
/private/var/folders/68/kk888d5s1g99nsjkfvml43rm0000gp/C/org.python.PythonLauncher

#a text document
/Users/cn13431/Library/Application Support/com.apple.sharedfilelist/com.apple.LSSharedFileList.ApplicationRecentDocuments/org.python.pythonlauncher.sfl3

#OneDrive junk
/Users/cn13431/Library/CloudStorage/OneDrive-[company name redacted]/Documents/python/pythonlaunchersearch.txt

#OneDrive junk
/Users/cn13431/Library/Group Containers/UBF8T346G9.OneDriveStandaloneSuite/OneDrive - [company name redacted].noindex/OneDrive - [company name redacted], Inc/Documents/python/pythonlaunchersearch.txt

#the same system settings gear image as before - it shows up twice in search results.
/Applications/Python 3.13/Python Launcher.app/Contents/Resources/PythonLauncher.icns

I could never be a detective, because I can't find where this rocketship icon is hiding. **How is Python still accessing the rocketship icon, even when it no longer exists? And how can I change the icon to be the System Settings gear instead?** Sharing an alternative to Jorrick's package that does allow to change the icon would also be a great answer. Postnote: The commented icon variable in the python program isn't helpful - that puts a small icon in the bottom right, like this:

I'm running 10.10.4, and can't seem to be able to change the generic folder icon. I've tried going into /System/Library/CoreServices/CoreTypes.bundle/Contents/Resources/ replacing the icon there but it made no change. Then I tried the app Liteicon and it just made the generic folder icon disappear. Does anyone know how to change it?

I have a certain PNG I'd like to replace a folder icon with. I noticed that when i Command-I this .png file, it will preview on the bottom, but not on the top left part (generic ".png" text appears instead). I also noticed that only images that DO appear on the top left side of the "Get Info" window can be successfully Command-C'ed + Command-V'ed into my target folders' "Get Info" top left area - so that the image is replaced. My question: is there some kind of standard for images that makes or breaks their compatibility with changing a folder's icon?

I am using Mac OS X Snow Leopard 10.6.8. I tried changing a folder's icon using this well known method. I used a png image as my target icon. The icon does get changed, but not to the picture itself, but the icon of a png file. The Icon I want to be there: What I get: You see? That is not the png itself, but the icon of a png file. I want the png to be the icon. Am I missing something? (If it is important, "Show Icon Preview" is turned on in Finder view options. This folder was read-only for everyone but after seeing https://apple.stackexchange.com/questions/9623/problems-changing-drive-icon I changed it to Read Write for everyone)

On Ventura 13.1, when I go to my “Recents” in Finder in icon view, and adjust the horizontal width, the number of columns adjust such that no files extend horizontally beyond the window bounds. This is the normal expected behaviour for me coming from better OSes like Windows and Linux. When I open any other folder in icon view and adjust the horizontal with, it does not adjust the number of columns, and instead just hides the files/folders outside of the view. In addition, it does not even show a scroll bar to indicate that anything is to the right. How do I make Finder always wrap the icons such that they do not extend horizontally beyond the window?