Mac’s operating system has allowed using a picture as the folder icon for decades. Plus, you can change the folder background to a different color or image. macOS 26 Tahoe takes things further by introducing additional customization options tailored to the folder icon.
You can now personalize your folders with popular icons (symbols) or emojis. So, if you’ve a folder where you keep just your college PDFs and Word documents, you can add a study emoji to it. In addition to using icons and emojis, macOS Tahoe also lets you change the folder icon color. Therefore, instead of sticking with the familiar blue folder icons, you can now change them to red, orange, yellow, green, gray, purple, blue, or something else.
Add an icon or emoji to a folder
• Right-click or Control-click over a Finder folder and select Customize Folder from the menu
• Browse through the stock icons and glyphs across categories such as People, Animals & Nature, Food & Drinks, Activity, Travel & Places, Objects, and Symbols to select the one you want to use (you can also click Emoji and pick one from there, or use the search field to find the right one)
• Click anywhere outside the icon picker to save your changes and exit the customization screen
Change the color of a folder icon
Unlike the above-mentioned icon feature, which is standalone, the folder color change is linked to the old tags feature. Earlier, when you added a tag to a folder, it would just show a small colored dot before the folder name. However, selecting a tag now applies that color to the entire folder icon. Right-click over a folder in Finder or Desktop and select one of the tags from the menu. To see all tags, go to the Customize Folder section and then click one of the colored dots at the top.
Change the color of all your folders
If you don’t want to change folder colors individually or add tags to do so, you can pick a desired color for all your Finder folders. Just note that doing so won’t change the color of any folders that you have customized on a per-case basis using the above-mentioned ‘Tags’ feature.
• Open System Settings from Apple menu
• Select Appearance from the left sidebar
• Click Folder color and select a suggested color, or click Custom Color to make a pick from millions of options
Remove the folder icon or revert to the default blue color
Right-click or Control-click over a folder on your Mac and select Customize Folder from the menu. Then, click Clear to remove the added symbol or emoji. To return to the original blue folder icon, click the current color or hit the tag icon to remove all tags.
macOS offers a super simple and fast way to convert images, directly from the Finder. Thanks to the handy Quick Actions feature, Mac users are able to convert any images from anywhere in the Finder, with just a few clicks.
This is a powerful and useful feature that is often overlooked. Here’s how it works:
• From Finder, locate the image you want to convert
• Right-click, control-click, or two-finger click on the image you wish to convert, and go to “Quick Actions” and then select "Convert Image" from the menu
• Select the file format type you wish to convert the image to and select the image size (choose "Actual Size" if you do not want to resize the image), choose whether or not you wish to preserve metadata, then click on the "Convert" button
The image will convert almost instantly and appear in the same folder with the same file name as the origin image. This Quick Action image conversion tool is super fast and powerful, but is limited to JPG, PNG, and HEIF/HEIC formats. If you wish to convert to additional image file formats, you will have to use Preview.
Whether you're feeling the pinch as hard drive space runs low or you're just wondering where all your disk space went, it's easy to find large files in macOS by using the built-in search tools.
Here's what to do:
• From the macOS Desktop, open any new Finder window
• Hit Command+F to bring up Search
• Click on "Kind" filter and select "Other", then select "File Size" from the attribute list
• Click on the second filter and choose "is greater than"
• In the third space, enter the size to search for anything greater than (ex: 100) and choose either MB or GB as the final filter
The file and app list below will automatically update as anything larger than the specified file size is found on the hard drive. Be sure that "This Mac" is selected if you're getting limited results, though you can also use the search limiters to find large files contained within single folders or user directories.
Want to use this feature to track down large files often? Click on the "Save" button in the upper right corner and you'll turn the File Size search into a Smart Folder that can be easily accessed from the sidebar for easy future retrieval, plus that folder will constantly be updated with large files only, making it a very useful way to instantly find any big item laying around on a Mac.
A common pit of enormous files is the user Downloads folder, when using the file size search don't be surprised if you run into a fair amount of .dmg and .zip files sitting idly in there that have long been forgotten.
In macOS Mojave or later, the Finder includes Quick Actions that make it easier to perform quick edits to files without having to open the apps associated with them. In the default set that Apple includes with every macOS install, there's a very handy Quick Action that allows you to remove the background from a selected image or photo.
The feature lifts the subject out of the picture and turns it into a PNG file, which makes the background transparent. The Quick Action works best on images with a clearly defined subject in the foreground, like a person or object, set against a fairly uniform background.
To use the Remove Background feature in macOS, simply right-click an image file in Finder, hover your cursor over the Quick Actions submenu, then click Remove Background.
Wait for the image to be processed, and you should soon see a transparent PNG version of the file appear in the same location as the original image, titled "[original filename] Background Removed.png.".
Stationery Pad is a handy way to nix a step in your workflow if you regularly use document templates on your Mac. The long-standing Finder feature essentially tells a file's parent application to open a copy of it by default, ensuring that the original file remains unedited. Almost any file type can be defined as a template with Stationery Pad – it could be used to streamline common Photoshop jobs, create skeleton HTML/CSS files, or help with Word document invoicing.
To take advantage of it, right-click (Ctrl-click) the file that you want to use as a template, select Get Info, then check the Stationery Pad checkbox under the General section. Lastly, click the red traffic light button to close the Get Info window. Next time you double-click the template file, Finder will automatically create and open a copy of it, leaving the original untouched.
Stationery Pad doesn't get much attention these days, but it's a neat alternative to repeatedly editing templates and using the "Save As..." command, which can lead to overwriting the original file if you're not too careful.
