Installing your folder icons

First, park the icons

Pick somewhere permanent. This takes fifteen seconds and prevents the single most common problem.

1. Unzip the file you downloaded.
2. Open the C:\ drive and make a new folder called StudioIcons.
3. Drag the icons folder into it. You should end up with C:\StudioIcons\icons\ full of .ico files.

Change one folder

Best when you're doing a handful, or trying it out for the first time.

1. Right-click the folder you want to change, then choose Properties.
2. Open the Customize tab.
3. Click Change Icon, then Browse.
4. Go to C:\StudioIcons\icons and pick the one you want.
5. Click OK, then Apply.

Change them all at once

The included apply-icons.bat matches icons to folders by name — a folder called Clients gets Clients.ico.

1. Rename your folders so they match the icon names exactly. Capital letters don't matter. Spelling does.
2. Double-click apply-icons.bat.
3. Paste in the full path of the folder that holds your folders, then press Enter. For example C:\Users\You\Pictures — not the path of one folder inside it.
4. It prints what it applied and what it skipped. Skipped means no folder matched that name.

If nothing changes

Windows caches icons and sometimes keeps showing the old one.

1. Click the desktop and press F5.
2. Still stuck? Press Windows + R, type ie4uinit.exe -show, press Enter.
3. Last resort: sign out and back in.

Mac ignores .ico files entirely. Use the PNGs in the png folder instead. There's nothing to install and nothing to park — Mac copies the picture into the folder itself.

1. Open a PNG from the png folder in Preview.
2. Press Cmd + A, then Cmd + C to copy it.
3. Click your folder once to select it, then press Cmd + I.
4. Click the small icon in the top-left corner of that window so it gets a blue highlight. Not the large picture in the middle. That one does nothing.
5. Press Cmd + V.

1. Windows: right-click the image, choose Set as desktop background. Pick the size closest to your screen. 1920×1080 suits most laptops; 2560×1440 suits most external monitors.
2. Mac: System Settings, then Wallpaper, then Add Photo.
3. Drag your folders into the three zones.
4. On Windows, right-click the desktop, open View, and turn off Auto arrange icons. Leave "Align icons to grid" on — it keeps things tidy without snapping everything back to the left edge.

If your set uses painted artwork, each icon file quietly holds two versions of itself.

At large sizes you get the full painted artwork. At small sizes — list view, the address bar, the taskbar — it switches to a simple symbol, because painted detail turns into a brown smudge at sixteen pixels across. This is deliberate, and it's how professional icon sets have always been built.

1. Windows, one folder: Properties, Customize, Change Icon, then Restore Defaults.
2. Windows, all of them: delete the hidden desktop.ini file inside each folder. Turn on hidden files in the View menu first.
3. Mac: select the folder, press Cmd + I, click the small icon in the corner, press Delete.

None of this touches the files inside your folders. You're only changing the picture on the outside.