Thanks for your reply, those seem to be tutorials for changing the system folder icons though.
@Paulo Freitas Valvator do you mind sharing your secret?
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Changing Folder Icons Big Sur
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@Paulo Freitas Valvator do you mind sharing your secret?
It's no secret, here's how to do itThanks for your reply, those seem to be tutorials for changing the system folder icons though.
@Paulo Freitas Valvator do you mind sharing your secret?
borp99
Changing Folder Icons Big Sur
***Change Big Sur System Folder Icons*** [**UPDATED** to work with final public release of 11.0.1 on Nov 14, 2020] NB. LiteIcon 4.1 can now only change individual app and drive icons on BS. No global change to System folder icons [is now] possible. LiteIcon will only launch on BS if you alter...
forums.macrumors.com
Thank you, and sorry that I missed this (didn't get a notification?).It's no secret, here's how to do it
borp99
Changing Folder Icons Big Sur
***Change Big Sur System Folder Icons*** [**UPDATED** to work with final public release of 11.0.1 on Nov 14, 2020] NB. LiteIcon 4.1 can now only change individual app and drive icons on BS. No global change to System folder icons [is now] possible. LiteIcon will only launch on BS if you alter...
Call me dumb but isn't that post a tutorial on replacing folder icons? I read the whole post and it seems to be that... I'm wondering how you changed system icons such as the one for the App Store or for System Preferences.
Ah, you want to change system app icons...
That's probably more challenging, I suspect.
Those would be somewhere in the code for each app, and not within the system itself, and probably would mean discovering how to modify a specific app to change the app's icon.
That's probably more challenging, I suspect.
Those would be somewhere in the code for each app, and not within the system itself, and probably would mean discovering how to modify a specific app to change the app's icon.
Well it looks like @Paulo Freitas Valvator has done it (note the App Store for example) so I'm a little confused.
You used ThemeEngine for the app icon changes? Is there a tutorial for this somewhere? (Not for the folder icons, the app icons)
In case you didn't work it out, right click any System app (or any 3rd party app for that matter) and select 'Show package Contents'. Go to Contents/Resources folder and there will usually be an Assets.car file or a 'xxxxx.icns' file (where xxxxx is the name of the App), or both. Experiment with editing the Assets.car file with ThemeEngine or editing the 'icns' file with any graphics editing app (Apple's Preview offers basic editing). If you change the icon of a root-level system app, you'll need to do the file replacing, font icon cache clearing and new snapshot applying in Recovery mode, in order for the change to show up.
***Change Big Sur System Folder Icons***
[**UPDATED further @ 18.4.2021** to work with 11.2.3 or later ]
NB. LiteIcon 4.1 can now only change individual app and drive icons on BS. No global change to System folder icons [is now] possible. LiteIcon will only launch on BS if you alter the SystemVersionCompat.plist string from 10.16 to 10.15, which isn’t ideal - so maybe just customise some icons via the Get Info ‘paste or drop image’ [old classic way] method (which leaves an invisible support file inside the app folder or at the drive root level).
However, just worked out @ July 31 2020, you ‘can’ globally change the system folder look to a customised one. Read on...
Big Sur does not use the /S/L/CS/Coretypes.bundle folder icons anymore to display the various System Folder icons. Instead, it uses a [generic] template folder icon (a PNG image in various pixel sizes and adds various font glyphs on top of it to denote the different types of System folder, or leaves the folder blank in the middle for new/basic folders, like the look of the old GenericFolderIcon.icns file from 10.9 and before. You can change the look of this background folder but the light blue font glyph (eg. for Applications, Library, Utilities, Home etc.) will remain being displayed in the centre of the folder, so that aspect of customising isn’t currently possible.
This method assumes that you have Big Sur installed on one drive or drive partition/volume and Mojave or Catalina on a different drive or drive partition/volume (High Sierra 10.13 may be OK too). **UPDATE** You can now do the whole process on just Big Sur if you want to.
Even if you want to install Big Sur on one of Apple’s supported machines, you should read up on how to install this new OS on an unsupported machine - critically as an unsealed (unencrypted) OS in either case. If in doubt, go to https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/macos-11-big-sur-on-unsupported-macs-thread.2242172/. For me, @ASentientBot's Hax3 method has worked to install many of the BS Beta versions but failed to work on the final public 11.0.1 version. Thankfully, @Barry K. Nathan's micropatcher 0.5.1 (https://github.com/barrykn/big-sur-micropatcher) worked from a patched USB stick installer. **UPDATE** Open Core Legacy Patcher (https://github.com/dortania/Opencore-Legacy-Patcher) has matured significantly since I posted the original method. On its own, I don't think it will install an unsealed BS operating system. Therefore, I still use the 0.5.1 micropatcher to create an install/update full BS installer. However, OCLP is now an excellent bootloader to run BS on most classic mac hardware from 2009 onwards (although a few very early macs eg. some MBPro's won't have graphics acceleration, so BS will be glacially slow and virtually not worth updating to - although the developers of OCLP are currently working on a fix for this in some furture version)
**recent UPDATE** You no longer need to disable SIP (‘csrutil disable’) or authenticated-root (‘csrutil authenticated-root disable’) in Recovery mode for this ability to change system folder icons. But you still need an unsealed system.
1. Boot normally into either 10.14, 10.15 or Big Sur and drag-and-drop (or Cmd+C, or right-click 'Copy') a copy of ‘Assets.car’ file from ‘BigSur/System/Library/PrivateFrameworks/IconFoundation.framework/Versions/A/Resources’ in to a working folder you can easily negotiate to. Keep this file as your untouched 'master' copy. Note: replace 'BigSur' with the name of your BS system volume.
Comment: you will have to do this from Big Sur if you haven’t ‘unsealed’ that OS when it was installed - as the Big Sur system volume will be encrypted and won’t show up or mount under 10.14 or 10.15 - only the BS user Data volume will. If BS 'is' unsealed, then you have the option of using any of the OS's to grab a copy of the file.
2a. If you are going to edit on 10.14, download the original ‘ThemeEngine.app’ from: https://github.com/alexzielenski/ThemeEngine/releases/tag/1.0.0(111). This version doesn’t work on Big Sur or Catalina.
2b. If you are going to edit on 10.15, download a newly built version for Catalina (great thanks to Allan Nyholm/macrumors member #65816) from: https://www.dropbox.com/s/911ao8l1g480c7a/ThemeEngine 2 for 10.15.zip?dl=0 (quit the sign up/login window and just do to Direct Download). This version doesn’t work on Big Sur or Mojave.
2c. If you are going to edit on 11.0.1 or later, Jeremy Legendre has ported ThemeEngine to run on BS (https://github.com/jslegendre/ThemeEngine - v1.0.0(114)). This version doesn’t work on Mojave or Catalina (it launches but crashes when opening a file).
- then boot into whichever macOS your ThemeEngine.app is designed to run on and open the Assets.car file [where-ever it was saved to] with that App.
3a. Modify ‘Folder’ and ‘FolderDark’ items (from the left side list). There are 10 icons to replace in each category (sizes are 16x16.png, 16x16x2x.png, 32x32.png, 32x32x2x.png, 128x128.png, 128x128x2x.png, 256x256.png, 256x256x2x.png, 512x512.png, 512x512x2x.png). You 'may' be able to use the same icons for each category if the regular 'Light' mode ones aren't too bright looking in the OS's 'Dark' mode.
Create a set of correctly sized PNG files based on your own 'master' folder image. If you don't wish to create the 10-20 variants one at a time, there are apps or on-line websites which can take your base 1-2 image(s), regardless of size or resolution (although it should ideally be at least 1024x1024x72ppi), and produce the set for you. A good app is Image2Icon - available for free from the AppStore (the paid advanced features aren’t required). Export to ‘Iconset’. Just make sure that your source image for the generic folder template has an alpha layer added. For me, I replaced each icon with images from 10.9’s CoreTypes.bundle ’GenericFolderIcon.icns’ file, using TIFF's for each size dragged to the desktop out of Preview’s left pane):
- click on one of the 10 icons, taking note of the particular size (of the selected icon) showing in the top right corner (as the set is ‘not’ usually displayed in size order).
- drag and drop a ‘like for like’ sized PNG icon on top of the highlighted icon.
- continue to do this for each of the other Folder and FolderDark icons.
- use ‘Save As…’ to save the modified Assets.car file to the Big Sur Desktop. Keep the two files in separate locations, so that the modified one doesn't overwrite the 'master' copy.
4. Instructions from here now altered on 24th Nov 2020, in order to simplify the final process even further. If you don't clear the icon cache files or rebuild the kc collections on the Preboot volume or add a new snapshot at the end, you will not see any change after moving the modified Assets.car file into the system folder.
NB. in the following, replace 'BigSur' with the name of your BS system volume, replace 'username' with your Home folder's name, replace 'BigSur - Data' with the name of your BS data volume. Remember that spaces in file, folder or volume names require a backslash to be added before the space eg. 'BigSur\ -\ Data'.
-> Boot into Recovery mode and use the Terminal:
diskutil mount /Volumes/BigSur
mount -uw /Volumes/BigSur
mv /Volumes/BigSur/Users/username/Desktop/Assets.car /Volumes/BigSur/System/Library/PrivateFrameworks/IconFoundation.framework/Versions/A/Resources/Assets.car
find /Volumes/BigSur\ -\ Data/private/var/folders/ -name 'com.apple.dock.iconcache' -exec rm {} \;
rm -r /Volumes/BigSur\ -\ Data/Library/Caches/com.apple.iconservices.store
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
**latest UPDATE** The following two terminal commands seem to no longer be required. Skip to 'bless'. If your system folder icons don't update to the new-look ones on reboot, then go back into Recovery, clear the icon cache again and add in these two commands, bless, then reboot.
kmutil install --volume-root /Volumes/BigSur --update-all --force
/Volumes/BigSur/usr/sbin/kcditto
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
bless --folder /Volumes/BigSur/System/Library/CoreServices --bootefi --create-snapshot
reboot
5. Boot back into Big Sur to (hopefully) see the folder changes!!!
*****************************************************************************************
PS. On a similar MacRumors forum, further developments have been chugging along in recent months that I was not aware of until today. The 2 big improvements seem to be:
1. IconChamp (https://www.macenhance.com/iconchamp.html) will 'soon' do the icon changes (I presume) without any terminal commands. However, it is noted that you still need an unsealed OS to start with. The app is awaiting release.
2. Takuro/macrumors6502a member has created a shell script to automate the above process. Have a look at:
forums.macrumors.com
[**UPDATED further @ 18.4.2021** to work with 11.2.3 or later ]
NB. LiteIcon 4.1 can now only change individual app and drive icons on BS. No global change to System folder icons [is now] possible. LiteIcon will only launch on BS if you alter the SystemVersionCompat.plist string from 10.16 to 10.15, which isn’t ideal - so maybe just customise some icons via the Get Info ‘paste or drop image’ [old classic way] method (which leaves an invisible support file inside the app folder or at the drive root level).
However, just worked out @ July 31 2020, you ‘can’ globally change the system folder look to a customised one. Read on...
Big Sur does not use the /S/L/CS/Coretypes.bundle folder icons anymore to display the various System Folder icons. Instead, it uses a [generic] template folder icon (a PNG image in various pixel sizes and adds various font glyphs on top of it to denote the different types of System folder, or leaves the folder blank in the middle for new/basic folders, like the look of the old GenericFolderIcon.icns file from 10.9 and before. You can change the look of this background folder but the light blue font glyph (eg. for Applications, Library, Utilities, Home etc.) will remain being displayed in the centre of the folder, so that aspect of customising isn’t currently possible.
This method assumes that you have Big Sur installed on one drive or drive partition/volume and Mojave or Catalina on a different drive or drive partition/volume (High Sierra 10.13 may be OK too). **UPDATE** You can now do the whole process on just Big Sur if you want to.
Even if you want to install Big Sur on one of Apple’s supported machines, you should read up on how to install this new OS on an unsupported machine - critically as an unsealed (unencrypted) OS in either case. If in doubt, go to https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/macos-11-big-sur-on-unsupported-macs-thread.2242172/. For me, @ASentientBot's Hax3 method has worked to install many of the BS Beta versions but failed to work on the final public 11.0.1 version. Thankfully, @Barry K. Nathan's micropatcher 0.5.1 (https://github.com/barrykn/big-sur-micropatcher) worked from a patched USB stick installer. **UPDATE** Open Core Legacy Patcher (https://github.com/dortania/Opencore-Legacy-Patcher) has matured significantly since I posted the original method. On its own, I don't think it will install an unsealed BS operating system. Therefore, I still use the 0.5.1 micropatcher to create an install/update full BS installer. However, OCLP is now an excellent bootloader to run BS on most classic mac hardware from 2009 onwards (although a few very early macs eg. some MBPro's won't have graphics acceleration, so BS will be glacially slow and virtually not worth updating to - although the developers of OCLP are currently working on a fix for this in some furture version)
**recent UPDATE** You no longer need to disable SIP (‘csrutil disable’) or authenticated-root (‘csrutil authenticated-root disable’) in Recovery mode for this ability to change system folder icons. But you still need an unsealed system.
1. Boot normally into either 10.14, 10.15 or Big Sur and drag-and-drop (or Cmd+C, or right-click 'Copy') a copy of ‘Assets.car’ file from ‘BigSur/System/Library/PrivateFrameworks/IconFoundation.framework/Versions/A/Resources’ in to a working folder you can easily negotiate to. Keep this file as your untouched 'master' copy. Note: replace 'BigSur' with the name of your BS system volume.
Comment: you will have to do this from Big Sur if you haven’t ‘unsealed’ that OS when it was installed - as the Big Sur system volume will be encrypted and won’t show up or mount under 10.14 or 10.15 - only the BS user Data volume will. If BS 'is' unsealed, then you have the option of using any of the OS's to grab a copy of the file.
2a. If you are going to edit on 10.14, download the original ‘ThemeEngine.app’ from: https://github.com/alexzielenski/ThemeEngine/releases/tag/1.0.0(111). This version doesn’t work on Big Sur or Catalina.
2b. If you are going to edit on 10.15, download a newly built version for Catalina (great thanks to Allan Nyholm/macrumors member #65816) from: https://www.dropbox.com/s/911ao8l1g480c7a/ThemeEngine 2 for 10.15.zip?dl=0 (quit the sign up/login window and just do to Direct Download). This version doesn’t work on Big Sur or Mojave.
2c. If you are going to edit on 11.0.1 or later, Jeremy Legendre has ported ThemeEngine to run on BS (https://github.com/jslegendre/ThemeEngine - v1.0.0(114)). This version doesn’t work on Mojave or Catalina (it launches but crashes when opening a file).
- then boot into whichever macOS your ThemeEngine.app is designed to run on and open the Assets.car file [where-ever it was saved to] with that App.
3a. Modify ‘Folder’ and ‘FolderDark’ items (from the left side list). There are 10 icons to replace in each category (sizes are 16x16.png, 16x16x2x.png, 32x32.png, 32x32x2x.png, 128x128.png, 128x128x2x.png, 256x256.png, 256x256x2x.png, 512x512.png, 512x512x2x.png). You 'may' be able to use the same icons for each category if the regular 'Light' mode ones aren't too bright looking in the OS's 'Dark' mode.
Create a set of correctly sized PNG files based on your own 'master' folder image. If you don't wish to create the 10-20 variants one at a time, there are apps or on-line websites which can take your base 1-2 image(s), regardless of size or resolution (although it should ideally be at least 1024x1024x72ppi), and produce the set for you. A good app is Image2Icon - available for free from the AppStore (the paid advanced features aren’t required). Export to ‘Iconset’. Just make sure that your source image for the generic folder template has an alpha layer added. For me, I replaced each icon with images from 10.9’s CoreTypes.bundle ’GenericFolderIcon.icns’ file, using TIFF's for each size dragged to the desktop out of Preview’s left pane):
- click on one of the 10 icons, taking note of the particular size (of the selected icon) showing in the top right corner (as the set is ‘not’ usually displayed in size order).
- drag and drop a ‘like for like’ sized PNG icon on top of the highlighted icon.
- continue to do this for each of the other Folder and FolderDark icons.
- use ‘Save As…’ to save the modified Assets.car file to the Big Sur Desktop. Keep the two files in separate locations, so that the modified one doesn't overwrite the 'master' copy.
4. Instructions from here now altered on 24th Nov 2020, in order to simplify the final process even further. If you don't clear the icon cache files or rebuild the kc collections on the Preboot volume or add a new snapshot at the end, you will not see any change after moving the modified Assets.car file into the system folder.
NB. in the following, replace 'BigSur' with the name of your BS system volume, replace 'username' with your Home folder's name, replace 'BigSur - Data' with the name of your BS data volume. Remember that spaces in file, folder or volume names require a backslash to be added before the space eg. 'BigSur\ -\ Data'.
-> Boot into Recovery mode and use the Terminal:
diskutil mount /Volumes/BigSur
mount -uw /Volumes/BigSur
mv /Volumes/BigSur/Users/username/Desktop/Assets.car /Volumes/BigSur/System/Library/PrivateFrameworks/IconFoundation.framework/Versions/A/Resources/Assets.car
find /Volumes/BigSur\ -\ Data/private/var/folders/ -name 'com.apple.dock.iconcache' -exec rm {} \;
rm -r /Volumes/BigSur\ -\ Data/Library/Caches/com.apple.iconservices.store
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
**latest UPDATE** The following two terminal commands seem to no longer be required. Skip to 'bless'. If your system folder icons don't update to the new-look ones on reboot, then go back into Recovery, clear the icon cache again and add in these two commands, bless, then reboot.
kmutil install --volume-root /Volumes/BigSur --update-all --force
/Volumes/BigSur/usr/sbin/kcditto
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
bless --folder /Volumes/BigSur/System/Library/CoreServices --bootefi --create-snapshot
reboot
5. Boot back into Big Sur to (hopefully) see the folder changes!!!
*****************************************************************************************
PS. On a similar MacRumors forum, further developments have been chugging along in recent months that I was not aware of until today. The 2 big improvements seem to be:
1. IconChamp (https://www.macenhance.com/iconchamp.html) will 'soon' do the icon changes (I presume) without any terminal commands. However, it is noted that you still need an unsealed OS to start with. The app is awaiting release.
2. Takuro/macrumors6502a member has created a shell script to automate the above process. Have a look at:
Changing system icons on Big Sur
I decided to make a shell script to help automate the modification of application icons and folder icons. Let me know how it works, and I'll fix any issues via best effort. https://workupload.com/file/rhTEm5FVYUS Source code: #!/bin/bash echo "+---------------------------+" echo "| Big Sur...
forums.macrumors.com
Last edited:
I hope IconChamp doesn't need an unsealed OS, which is now the big challenge, because this causes a problem, it is no longer possible to upgrade the OS, just download it again and install it again.
Open Core Legacy Patcher boots an unsealed Big Sur ‘and’ allows for delta updates (full updates/overwrites not necessary). I prefer an unsealed OS, as the drives still show up under previous OS’s back to 10.12 and you can read/write files to/from Big Sur. A sealed BS locks this out.
1- create your icon, i use illustrator, for the best quality create a 1024x1024px file
2- to create Asset I use Image Asset Icon Resizer Pro: https://apps.apple.com/en/app/image-asset-icon-resizer-pro/id797183180?mt=12
3- it will create a folder with all Assets
4- we open the _ _ _ _.car file with ThemEngine, we go to the part of the Appicon in elements and we drag and drop our Assets with the correct sizes, for that we click on it and check in the upper right corner. do for all Asets and finally we save the file.
And that's it, we have our icon file .car
Iconchamp, the paid version works very well, without code and just drag and drop:
Thanks for your excellent work,
I tried iconChamp, it's really impressive, just drag and drop, restart the finder and the dock ... it's instantaneous, how did you do this, change system icons without having to break anything, (or something breaks but you can't see it)
Olá Paulo,
It's been a while since I checked these pages, so was surprised to read that you have been using IconChamp (well done tracking down the beta link). I DL'ed it and, out of interest, paid for the Pro update last night (was also surprised that the Paddle registration is already working).
I'm also impressed that it works so well - without any of the terminal work from Recovery. I see that their method of replacing non-Apple app icons is simply to automate the inclusion of a hidden 'Icon?' file inside the app's folder - which can always be done without a GUI app.
However, overriding the system folder icons, without the need to apply a new snapshot or a restart, is very clever indeed!! My gut feeling is that the developers have found a way to intercept the display of the system folder icons in real time, suppressing the glyphs in the process, and replacing the icons with those from a hidden store (which I've yet to find... / they must be held somewhere, so the user doesn't necessarily have to keep a copy of their custom folder icons, or while they test out different ones).
Hi borp99,
It's really amazing how they do it, they don't change the icons, the .icn and .car files remain unchanged, they just change the instantaneous view. the icons we changed are located in users/shared/iconchamp. Does not change trash and calendar icons (dock). But a great job.
Ahh, I didn't think of looking there. Thanks! The files had to be somewhere that's 'User-side' and can't be encrypted or locked out. I'm still impressed that the developers managed to suppress what I can only image is an unrelenting OS trying to control everything in the background - which it seems is how Apple sees the world, bless them.