You can use any image as an icon, including photos you’ve taken yourself or, if you’re feeling inspired, then why not open up your favourite image-editing software and create your own icons? If you do decide to try your hand at icon design, then you’ll find some useful advice over at Apple’s OS X Human Interface Guidelines. In this article, I’m going to show you how to replace any folder, file or hard drive icon, with any image that’s stored on your Mac. It can also help you differentiate between files of the same type (which by default all have the same icon) and, if you have several hard drives that you switch between on a regular basis, then assigning a different icon to each drive can help you keep track of which hard drive is currently connected to your Mac. Replacing some of the default folder icons with custom icons can help you see, at a glance, whether a folder contains something exciting like photos of your vacation, or something more practical like tax returns. While macOS’ default icons do communicate some basic information about each item, macOS uses the same icon for all folders and all hard drives, plus it uses the same icon for all files of the same type. Every Mac comes with a range of icons that are used to represent your files, hard drives and folders in the ‘Finder’ window and on the Desktop, but you don’t have to use these default icons.
