How to change multiple folder icons at once on Mac

Select every folder you want to change, press Option-Command-I to open Finder's Inspector — one Info window for the whole selection — click the small icon at its top left, press Delete to clear, then Command-V to paste your image. One paste, every folder. Apple has never documented it. Here is the gesture, the evidence behind it, and the plan B if your Mac refuses.

Updated 2026-09-10 · 8 min read

One window for the whole selection: the Inspector, not Get Info

Two editorial pages ranking for this query say macOS cannot do this natively; the result above them is an Apple forum thread from 2009 that says it can. The thread is right: the gesture exists, and nobody — Apple included — has written it up since.

People conclude it's impossible because they try the shortcut they know. Select ten folders, press Command-I, and Finder “opens a separate window for each one”, as MacMost put it in 2023. Ten windows, ten pastes — no batch.

The Inspector is a different window: it “floats on top of Finder windows, and it updates automatically to reflect whatever is currently selected”, “only one Inspector can be open at a time”, and with several items selected it summarises the selection. Press Option-Command-I, or hold Option while opening the File menu (or the contextual menu) and Get Info turns into Show Inspector.

The gesture, from the Apple Support Communities thread that still ranks first: “select any number of folders you want and enter command_option_i. in the resulting popup select the little icon in the upper left corner and hit delete. this will remove the custom icons from all selected icons.” Another user there adds that the same window applies an icon or a label to every selected item. Gary Rosenzweig of MacMost gave the applying half in 2012: “Select the folders and use Command+Option+I to bring up the inspector. Then change the icon by selecting the icon in the inspector and pasting the graphic into it.” A MacRumors thread asked the same in July 2013 and had it confirmed under OS X Mavericks that November.

Now the state of the evidence. Apple does not document this gesture; it is attested on Apple's own forum since Mac OS X 10.6 and confirmed on MacMost and MacRumors up to Mavericks, and no removal has been reported since — nor any confirmation after 2013, and this page claims none. On current macOS, the Inspector still exists (MacMost, 2023) and pasting an icon through Get Info “still works” on Tahoe per Howard Oakley, though it “has some significant limitations and is fiddly”. If the thumbnail refuses the paste on your Mac, the Terminal section below is the plan B. For a single folder, see how to change a folder icon on Mac.

Prepare the image once: 1024 × 1024, and copy the pixels, not the file

A batch multiplies every mistake by the number of folders, so get the image right once. Howard Oakley's recommendation: “a PNG image with a transparent background and dimensions of 1024 x 1024 pixels”.

Then copy the pixels, not the file. Apple's procedure in the macOS Tahoe 26 guide starts with “Double-click an image file to open it in the Preview app”, then “Choose Edit > Copy in the menu bar to copy the image to the Clipboard”. Selecting the PNG in Finder and pressing Command-C copies the file's icon representation instead of the picture — the usual source of a blurry or blank result, multiplied by the size of the batch. MacMost's Tahoe guide puts it in one line: “Open an image in Preview, select all, and copy.” If the result is soft anyway, custom folder icon blurry on Mac? covers the other causes.

Apple also documents the trap that applies to the Inspector as much as to Get Info: “If Edit > Paste isn't available, you may have clicked the large icon below Preview.” The target is the small icon at the top of the window, below the title bar.

Why you clear before you paste: an Apple engineer's answer

Step 5 below — Delete first, paste second — is not forum superstition: it is the workaround an Apple engineer handed developers in July 2025.

The thread, on the Apple Developer Forums, concerns a sandboxed app that sets folder icons. The first change shows; later changes to the same folder don't, and neither a file-system change notification, a touched modification date nor an AppleScript update makes Finder let go. Apple Developer Technical Support's answer: “I did find a straightforward workaround, which is to clear the icon first (by setting it to nil when using NSWorkspace), THEN setting the icon to your final value. Clearing the icon like this forces the Finder to go through the 'default' icon discovery path (the way objects get icons when no icon is set), which means that all of your icon sets are going from 'No icon -> New icon', never 'Old icon -> New icon'.”

That is the two-pass gesture, seen from code. Pasting straight onto folders that already carry a custom icon is the “Old icon → New icon” case Finder caches — which is why a one-shot paste on an already-decorated batch looks random, some folders taking the image and some keeping the old one. Delete on the Inspector's thumbnail empties every icon in the selection; the paste that follows is “No icon → New icon” for all of them. If one folder still won't update, see folder icon not changing on Mac?.

What the batch won't touch: system folders, and anything in iCloud Drive

Trim the selection before opening the Inspector. Apple's rule: “Although you can customize the Home folder, you can't customize other folders that come with your Mac, such as Applications, Library, System, and Users.” Oakley states the general case: items on the Signed System Volume, and folders you lack write access to, can't take a custom icon. Nothing documents how the Inspector handles a read-only item in a selection, so select only folders, and leave those four, plus anything you can't write to, out.

Write access matters because of where the icon lives. For a file, macOS writes an icns resource into the com.apple.ResourceFork extended attribute. For a folder, in Oakley's words, “it isn't added as an extended attribute to the folder, but is added to a hidden file named Icon\r” — the last character a carriage return — plus a custom-icon flag in com.apple.FinderInfo. Forty folders means forty hidden files written, and every limit below applies forty times.

The first limit is iCloud Drive. Oakley's 2023 analysis: “Custom icons only appear in iCloud Drive on the Mac that customised them, and don't appear on other Macs or devices.” iCloud Drive “strips all xattrs of type com.apple.ResourceFork”, the Icon\r file is flagged as not storable in the cloud, extended attributes are capped at roughly 32,650 bytes per file, and “there's no way to work around that behaviour”. Tahoe's colours and emoji go the other way, as the table shows: their com.apple.icon.folder attribute is flagged for sync.

Colouring a batch of folders on macOS 26: go through tags

If what the batch needs is a colour rather than a picture, skip the Inspector. macOS 26's Customize Folder panel — colour plus a symbol or an emoji — is documented by Apple one folder at a time: “select a folder, then click the Action button. Choose Customize Folder.” No source covers a multiple selection, so this page claims nothing either way.

The batch route for colour is tags. On macOS 26, Oakley notes, “Applying a coloured Finder tag to a folder now changes the colour of that folder, as well as displaying a coloured dot”; Macworld confirms: “Starting with macOS Tahoe, tags also change the folder's color.” The switch is in Finder's settings — “you can disable that in the control Tint folder based on tags at the foot of the Tags view in Finder's Settings”.

Apple's tag guide is singular too — select the item, open the File menu, choose a colour above Tags — so take this as Finder behaviour rather than an Apple procedure: with several folders selected, a colour circle in the contextual menu, or dragging the selection onto a sidebar tag, tags them all at once. Oakley's trap: “Depending on the order the tags have been applied, two folders with the same multiple tags may be shown in different folder colours.” One colour tag per batch — and remember that a tag or emoji is a Finder layer that travels with the folder, while a pasted icon is a file written inside it.

If the Inspector refuses: a Terminal loop, and what it costs

If the Inspector's thumbnail won't take the paste, or you'd rather script it, there is a maintained command-line tool: fileicon by mklement0, version 0.3.5 released 10 May 2026, with set, get, rm and test subcommands, for files and folders. Install it with brew install fileicon (or npm install fileicon -g); version 0.3.1 and later need macOS 12 or newer. One line, no sudo, over every folder inside a parent:

for d in ~/Documents/Projects/*/; do fileicon set "$d" ~/Desktop/icon.png; done

To undo, run fileicon rm "$d" through the same loop. The honest trade-off: the tool generates “a set of icons in several resolutions” of which “the icon with the highest resolution measures 512 x 512 pixels” — half the fineness of the 1024 × 1024 image you paste by hand.

The sips/Rez/SetFile recipes that have circulated for ten years are no longer reliable since High Sierra; prefer fileicon. And Automator is not the tool — asked in 2012, Gary Rosenzweig answered: “I can't think of a way to use Automator to do that. But it would be the wrong tool for it anyway.”

When the batch becomes a house style: Mac+

Everything above is the right answer for one batch with one image. It stops being the answer when the batch is a house style: several dozen folders on one pattern or palette.

Mac+ is a native macOS app built for that case: 52 patterns in 24 families and 44 palettes, rendered onto the real macOS folder shape; drop in your own image and it fits it to the shape. Select a batch of folders, apply one style to all of them in a single action, reset any of them to Apple's default blue with one click. Everything renders locally, no telemetry. The free tier includes 6 folder icons; the paid tier is €1.99 a month or €9.99 once. macOS 13 or later, Apple Silicon and Intel.

What it doesn't change: Mac+ writes custom icons, so they do not sync through iCloud Drive — unlike Tahoe's colours and emoji — and Applications, Library, System and Users stay out of reach.

The batch gesture, step by step

1. Prepare the image: a square PNG, 1024 × 1024 pixels, with a transparent background if the artwork needs one.
2. Open it in Preview, then choose Edit > Select All followed by Edit > Copy. Do not copy the file from Finder — that copies its icon, not the picture.
3. In Finder, select every folder to change: Command-click, Shift-click or a selection rectangle. Keep only folders, and leave out Applications, Library, System and Users.
4. Press Option-Command-I. A single floating Inspector window opens for the whole selection, instead of one Get Info window per folder.
5. Click the small icon at the top left of that window, below the title bar, then press Delete. Any custom icon already present is removed from the entire selection.
6. With the thumbnail still selected, press Command-V. The image is applied to every selected folder.
7. If a folder still shows its old icon, close and reopen its window. Step 5 is not optional: it is what avoids the cached case Finder holds on to, explained in the section on the Apple engineer's answer.

macOS 13 or later. Apple Silicon and Intel. Free tier, no account required — €1.99/month or €9.99 once for the paid tier.

Frequently asked questions

Keep reading

Sources

• Apple Support — Change icons for files, folders, or disks on Mac (macOS Tahoe 26 guide)
• Apple Support Communities — Batch replacing folder icons in Snow Leopard
• Apple Developer Forums — Seeking a Reliable Way to Refresh Finder for Custom Folder Icon Changes in a Sandboxed App (DTS answer, July 2025)
• The Eclectic Light Company — Add custom file and folder icons in Sequoia (7 February 2025)
• The Eclectic Light Company — Customising folders in Tahoe (18 September 2025)
• MacMost forum — How To Change Multiple Folder Icons Using Automator (15 April 2012)
• mklement0/fileicon — command-line tool for custom file and folder icons (v0.3.5, 10 May 2026)

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