“You can change the photos on your Desktop background and customise many other features – so why not tailor your icons, too!”

Make your own icons for files and folders

SKILL LEVEL

Anyone can do it

IT WILL TAKE

15 minutes

YOU’ll NEED OS X 10.9 or higher, Image2icon, some

images

The Mac’s operating system has always been visual in nature, and this makes it intuitive. Back in the days when other systems relied on command lines, Mac OS prided itself on enabling you to use icons. Files, folders and applications were easily differentiated through visual cues. You didn’t have to type out a path to access a favourite application – you’d just spot its icon and doubleclick on it.

Icons on the Mac can also be customised by the user. Although you can (at least until El Capitan) muck about with system and app icons, those are already differentiated by their unique designs. In your Dock, you can already tell apart, say, Safari, Mail and iTunes. But if you’ve got a few folders in your Dock, they all look exactly the same.

In Finder, you can of course apply custom icons by pasting images copied from elsewhere into the Get Info field, but Image2icon makes the process of adding and restoring icons far easier. It also offers one-off optional payments to unlock templates and extra export types (£4.49 each), or everything at once (£7.99). The base app is free, however, and that’s what we use in this tutorial. Craig Grannell

Image2icon makes the process of adding and restoring icons far easier