How To Customize Folders In macOS Tahoe

Hi this is Gary with MacMost.com. Let me show you how you can customize folders on your Mac using colors, symbols, and emoji. So a new feature in macOS Tahoe and beyond is the ability to change the color of a folder in the Finder in macOS and also add symbols or emoji characters to that folder and it will not only work on your Mac but on iCloud, it'll show up on your other Macs if you have any, and even on your iPad and iPhone as well. So for instance here's my sample documents folder and you can see it's filled with these standard blue folders. Now I know some people probably love having a grid of completely identical folders like this. It makes it so easy to pick out exactly what you want right? Well if you don't like this and want a few folders to stand out you can now do it. Let's start with the colors first. So to assign a color to a folder what you're going to do is you're going to tag that folder. So tags have been around for a long time and they have colors associated with them. What's changed in macOS Tahoe and beyond is that the first tags color will be used as the color for the folder icon as well. Now if you've never used tags before don't worry too much about it. I promise it won't hurt and we're not actually really going to use tags. We're just going to assign one tag to a folder. So for instance let's go to this folder here called notes and let's say we want this to be a different color to make it stand out. So you're going to bring up the context menu which you do by control clicking, right clicking on a mouse or a two-finger click on a trackpad. This brings up the context menu and then there's a section under here with these colored circles. These circles are tags. Now you've got red, orange, blue, yellow, green, purple, and gray. These are the default tags. If you've never used tags before this is what you've got and notice the name for each tag matches the color. So the tag red uses the red color. For tags this isn't necessarily the case. You can create your own tags and assign one of these colors to it and the name could be anything you want like work or personal or home, vacation, that kind of thing and then assign blue, green, purple, whatever you want to those tags. But for the default tags they're simply tags with the color name that use the same color. So I'm going to select the first one here red. When I do notice two things. First the folder changes to the red color. Also notice the dot underneath next to the name. That dot indicates a tag has been applied to this folder and it's a tag with a red color. If I were to select the folder and then use command i to bring up the info window about it, you would see in the tags area here the red tag is applied. You can edit this list here. If I click here I can add more tags to it. You could have as many tags as you want applied to a single file but I could also simply delete that tag like that and it removes the tag there and you could see the color is now gone as well as the tag. You could do the same thing in the context menu. I could assign the orange tag here. I can go back into the context menu and I can click on orange again to remove it. Now if you don't see all the colors here it may be because you've used tags before and you've customized things. I'm going to go in the finder here to settings and you can see that I've got all of these color tags. I even have one here I created called work and I assigned the color orange to that tag but that tag if you apply to a folder won't change the color. It's only these tags red, orange, blue, yellow, green, purple, and gray. They will assign color to the folder. So use these think of them as red means assign the red color, orange means assign the orange color, and they're different than tags like work, home, personal, project A, project B, that kind of thing. But also you have this area here where you have your default tags the ones that you use the most to make it easy to assign tags to things. So you want to make sure these are all set to the colors. You can drag and drop into here or out of here and rearrange the order like I just did there. So you want to have those set up with the colors so that when you look here you can easily pick the color that you want to assign to the folder. And note if you assign multiple colors the one most recently assigned that's the one that's going to get the color for the folder there. If I move those around like that you could see the other one now gets it. If you find these videos valuable consider joining the more than 2,000 others that support MacMost at Patreon. You get exclusive content, course discounts, and more. You can read about it at macmost.com slash patreon. So now let's look at the other way you can customize folders and that's by assigning a symbol or emoji character to the folder. So the way this works is you bring up the context menu like before and if you'd rather not use the context menu you can also select the folder and then go to file and find customize listed here as well. You'll see the colors are there too. So either way you do it it's going to bring up this special control. Note that at the top you also have the colors. So this is another way to assign colors to the folders. So now you can assign one of these symbols here and it's going to imprint the symbol on the folder. So I'm going to choose the very first one here and notice how it imprints that symbol. I could change to another symbol and try out different ones to get the symbol I want. The way these look is very similar to how some of the default folders look. If I were to go to the home folder here note that downloads, applications, movies, music, pictures, and so on they've had symbols like this on them for a while now. The difference here is now we can apply them to our folders as well. So you can get really creative with how you use these symbols. For instance under food and drinks here you might want to use this fork and knife or perhaps this frying pan to indicate that this is a folder filled with recipes that you've clipped as pdf files. Under travel and places you've got icons for things like cars. You may want to indicate that you've got files in here with documents pertaining to your car or maybe the little house here for things that have to do with maintaining your home. So if you have a folder that is information pertaining to say one of your pets you can go to animals and nature and there's cat and dog and other animals here. But also you can go down to the objects section and there's a little vet medical bag there as well. If you've got sheet music say you can maybe use these piano keys here but also you can go down to symbols and there are a few different musical notes that you can choose from. Also under objects if you're say an artist you may want to collect your artwork in a folder using an icon like this palette here or for your favorite artwork you may want to use a symbol like this or fireworks and for artwork that didn't turn out so well maybe something like that. And if after experimenting you decide you don't want an icon on this you can use the clear button at the bottom to clear it away. Now one of the problems with these symbols is they're just kind of a little imprint on the folder. They're really subtle so if you want a better way to have a folder stand out you may want to use an emoji character instead. An emoji character has the advantage of being full color and there are a ton of them to choose from. To do this all you need to do is go down to the bottom here next to the clear button there's an emoji button. Click that and it brings up the emoji and special character chooser. You may be familiar with this for using it in other apps like messages and pages and so forth. So you've got your favorites here at the top and you can scroll through all these different characters. There's tons of them tons of different people with professions tons of different symbols some classic emojis some new emoji characters lots of stuff that you can use and they're very colorful. So if you pick one like this dolphin here it will stand out maybe not so much against that blue folder there but maybe this dog might stand out even better. There are so many to choose from that instead of just scrolling through it you probably just want to search. So for instance if you have a folder that has business files in it you may want to search for business things and come up with stuff like that or you know charts or finance or money and just see what comes up. Sometimes an obvious symbol won't come up with the search term you need to keep trying different terms to see what will appear because the search terms are just looking at the names for these characters and sometimes a few other words that Apple has associated with them. If you go down far enough you'll find flags for all the different countries. So planning a trip just assigning the flag of the country you're going to to a folder. Also below this you're going to find lots of other standard symbols that are even older than emoji characters and some of these may work out really well and notice how the black lines of the text actually changes to that same kind of imprint color that you saw with the symbols. So you've got an imprint of this symbol here and if I were to change the color you can see the imprint goes with it. Now as I mentioned before this works across all of your Apple devices as long as they're all updated to the 26 versions like iPadOS 26 and iOS 26. So for instance here you can see the icons and how I've set them up in Finder on my Mac and here's my iPhone in the Files app in the same location in iCloud Drive and you can see all of the same stuff is there and if I were to tap and hold a folder like this one here you can see I have the ability to customize the color and tags here as well. So let me set the tag for this one to red and then I'm going to select a symbol there and then okay and it will update here in my Files app and then will also show up in a few seconds on my Mac like that and then I can go on my Mac here and decide to further change that change it to yellow and use this one instead and that will update then on my iPhone in the Files app there. Now this is still the very first version of macOS that has this feature so there are some places where this works and some places where this doesn't. For instance if I were to make an alias of this folder here just by using the context menu you could see the alias does not have the same look as the original and I can't change the color or even have an option to change the symbol for the alias. It doesn't work in the dock either if I drag this to the right side of the dock add it here and then change it to display as folder I'm just going to get the standard blue folder. It doesn't work in the finder sidebar if I drag this to the finder sidebar under favorites you see I get the standard symbol there you wouldn't expect there to be a symbol representation of the purple folder anyway. It doesn't work in spotlight so if I were to search for the folder called daily reports here in spotlight and you can see it comes up here that's the folder but it doesn't show the color and symbol there which is a shame because it'd be nice to be able to pick it out from the results. But it does work with quick look if I select the folder here and hit the spacebar you can see the quick look preview of the folder actually shows the color and the emoji character in this case. Another place it does work is if you hold the command key down and drag to add to the finder toolbar you can see it works there and it works in finder searches as well so if you're not using the spotlight menu with command space if you just search here in the finder and I'll just search in this folder here you could see that just for file names here you can see daily reports does actually have the color and the little icon that's on there. But note if you control click right click or two finger click on a search result here you can't actually customize the symbol or emoji you can select a new color though if one's not already assigned I can remove the color like that. So I expect maybe Apple to work out at least some of these in the future so it works in more places. Now previous to macOS Tahoe you customize folders by pasting a new icon over the old one you could still do that that still works so for instance I'll go here into this folder I've got an image file right here I'll double click to open it up in preview command a to select all command c to copy so I'm making sure I'm copying the pixels you can do it other ways but this is the cleanest way to do it. Then I go to a folder like let's say this one here use command i to get info select the icon and command v to paste that image that's how it worked before and that's how it still works but note that it still has the same restriction it had before it doesn't work across to other devices so this is an iCloud drive on other devices this is just going to appear as a regular folder it's only on this Mac that I get this custom icon so you can still use your own folder graphics pictures you've taken of objects or your dog or whatever you like for folder icons if you want hope you found this useful thanks for watching if you like this video click the thumbs up button below to let me know I publish new tutorials each weekday hit the subscribe button so you don't miss out