Custom Folders on Your Mac

 

A friend recently shared how she found out how to change the colors of the default light blue folders on your Mac. It’s fairly easy and can make a gal like myself jump for joy at the thought of another way to organize my files. 🤓

Steps to make colored folders!

1. Go to this site: Colored Folders
2. Download the folders (free download)
3. Drag the colors out of the downloaded folder onto your desktop and rename them. Delete the unwanted files inside the folder to the trash.
4. Add your files just as you would any other folder on your Mac.

Another fun thing you can do is search for images of folders that other users have created and are available to download for free. Example below:

CREATE YOUR OWN! 

I really wanted to learn how to create my own folders with textures and colors. I went to my go-to tool, Keynote. Here are the steps to create your own custom folders:

1. Open Keynote and use the shape tool to draw with pen. You can search for an image of a folder to use as a guide to trace over. Trace over the image of the folder and then delete the folder. You can fill the folder with your own custom color or a background image that you like. A great royalty-free background is from this site: backgroundlabs.com. There are many others out there, as well.
2. Once you have your folder the way you like it, you can take a screen shot of the folder or you can save the Keynote slide as an image.
3. Now, you need to get rid of the white or colored background on the slide. To do this, open the image using Preview. Use the instant alpha tool in  Preview and save the image as a transparent (.PNG) picture.
4. Create a new folder on your desktop (File>New Folder)
5. Click on your newly created image of the folder and press Command+i or use your secondary click and click GET INFO.
6. Press Command+A to select the entire picture and then Command+C to copy the image.
7. Click on the new folder you just created and press Command+i and click on the small image of the folder and press Command+V. You will now see that the folder has changed to your custom created folder.

Using Instant Alpha to delete the background image of the Keynote slide.

 

The folder will change once you paste the copied image.

**Important tip: I would recommend creating your custom colors that DO NOT include the color of your background image. For example, if your background color of your Keynote slide is white, I would recommend not using any white in the image of your folder. When using instant alpha, it is very difficult to not take out the same color as they bleed together.

Hope you have fun creating these folders! It does spice up your organization if you like that kind of thing! Plus, it makes your MacBook look more unique than anyone else’s! 🖥