Similar to changing an icon to an image, you can also swap icons around between items, files, and folders. How to Change an Icon to Another Icon in Mac OS From start to finish takes less than half a minute:Ĭustomizing icons to have the same icon as one found elsewhere is more or less the same, but rather than going through Preview to open and copy an origin image, you can do everything from the Get Info panel as we’ll discuss next. The video below demonstrates how quick this is, from copying the origin image to use as the icon, then setting it as the new customized icon for the destination app. Standard images do work, but without transparency they will draw a border around the icon, looking more like the auto-generated image file thumbnails that appear in the Finder than what an icon should like like. If you’ve never done so before, it is very easy to create a transparent PNG on the Mac by using the built-in Preview app. Using a transparent PNG (or GIF) makes sure the icon won’t have a white border around it when placed in the Dock or on the desktop. The end result is a custom icon appearing in the Finder:įor best results, always use a transparent PNG file for icons, and aim for the origin image to be 512×512 pixels to insure that it will scale up and down properly without becoming pixelated. Click on the icon in the upper left corner, then hit Command+V to paste the image and set the new icon.Now select the file/folder in the Finder that you want to change icons for, then hit Command+i to bring up the “Get Info” window (Get Info can also be accessed from the File menu and right-click in Finder).Open the image to use as an icon in Preview, then hit Command+A to “Select All”, then hit Command+C to Copy the image to the clipboard.In this example we’ll switch the default Automator application icon for this app that quits everything to a customized icon created through Preview:

How to Change an Icon to an Image in Mac OS XĬustomizing icons with any image is very easy. This works the same in all versions of MacOS and Mac OS X. Further below, we’ll demonstrate how to change an icon to another icon on the Mac. First, we’ll demonstrate how to change an icon to an image on the Mac.

Mac icon sets 2013