welcome back everyone my name is joel feld and today we are going to discuss the topic
of customizing your mac specifically to external hard drives and folders let's rock and roll
in one of my previous videos about talking about formatting your external drives i had a comment
from andy m he said joel can you do a video on how to change the icon on folders in more detail
please yes yes andy i can and i will this is one of those things that i quickly showed in the
other previous video which i'll link down below but it essentially allowed you to customize
different folders and different external hard drives with uh different pictures or
images and the reason being just because you can why why wouldn't you it's the ability to
just personalize your computer and your external hard drive to you and who you are so with that
let's go ahead and jump in and i'll show you what i mean i have two external hard drives here i'm
just going to go ahead and plug both of those into my computer and if i right click and wanted to
create a new folder and this would say joel's new folder for my external hard drive with the photos
it's this little robot guy sticking up his thumb with a little laptop the time machine is changes
by default to the time machine logo and then this is the internal mac hd and then you have this
folder blue icon that's pretty generic for all of your folders that you create so let's go ahead and
say i wanted to put a i don't know a polar bear ooh the coca-cola cola bear let's open up a new
tab here so i'm going to say coca cola polar bear oops didn't spell bear right i'm gonna do images
of all these different choices and i'm gonna scroll through i may not find exactly what i'm
looking for ah let's do this one this one looks like a nice poster drawing something like that
so i'm going to take this and i'm just going to drag it to the desktop which i have a whole bunch
of images on the desktop so let's just open up the finder and navigate to desktop and here is that
image here whenever you have a file selected if you press the space bar that gives you an option
that's called quick look it just quickly shows you that item without actually fully opening it up in
a particular app i use it 99 of the time and it's awesome so here's that image of the coca cola bear
say coca cola bear and when i double click on this it's going to open up in the default app which is
preview now let's just say i want to do it to this folder here i want to put this bear as the folder
icon so what i would do is i need to get the information on this folder so if i right click
on the folder and i choose get info that's option number one i could also click once on the folder
to select it go up to file and choose get info or i can do the keyboard shortcut which is command i
which is located under the file menu and you'll see that it is command i for info window here now
when that happens the information is just showing you information about whatever you have selected
but in the top left you have this little folder icon and notice when i click on it it actually
turns it blue it highlighted it so if i click off of it the highlight goes away if i click it again
it highlights it so i can actually come over to the coca-cola bear we're going to go to edit and
choose copy and i'm going to go to the folder here and we're just going to choose paste and what that
does is it now paste that icon for that folder now you'll notice here though it has a whole white
background and it just looks it looks like clipart and i don't like it this is where to take it a
step further we can actually get rid of that whole background which is very easy to do and i can do
that right here in preview and what i'm going to do is i'm going to use the markup tool inside of
preview and in the top left there's a tool called instant alpha when i click on this it gives me the
ability to have a tool that essentially says take out this solid color whatever it may be
so if i click and hold and start to drag notice it's defining and getting rid of all of the white
around that bear now if i go too much it's starting to go into the bear and i don't want that
so i need to back it off a little bit and if i let go it's now selected all of that so if i press
delete on the computer it's going to say hey do you want to convert this jpeg this document into
png i'm going to say yes yes i do and then it gets rid of all that now i'm going to take it
a step further because i could do the same thing with the rest of the white up here but i'm just
going to crop this photograph so i'm going to take the selection tool and we're just going to select
part of this and we can use the little blue dots as ways to refine the selection
i'm going to go up to tools and we're going to say crop and now we're just left with this bear
so now if i do edit select all we're going to do edit then copy now i can come back to
that folder here and i can either do the keyboard shortcut of command v or i could
go up to edit and choose paste but now that folder icon notice it's now the bear itself
instead of the whole picture with the white background it just looks a lot better so that's
that's a way that you can customize that and it just looks fun so let's do another one here
let's say i want to create a folder for each of my kids here i have a picture of ariana we have
bennett we have daniel and we have hudson here now if you don't want to use the instant alpha tool
you can always do any kind of custom selection that you want so let's open up ariana here we're
going to go to markup i could use the instant alpha tool to get rid of this white background
but notice it goes too much which is not going to work so i can always use the selection tool
and do a square if i wanted to and i could edit copy and we could go to a new folder
and we could title it the name ariana and again i right click on this i do get info brings up the
information tab and then i can paste it right into that photo and so now i have that as the image
or i could spend some time go back to preview or i could do an elliptical lasso if i hold down shift
on the keyboard it's going to do it in a perfect circle for me which is nice she really loves our
dog so we'll get him in there and i'm going to do copy keyboard shortcut we'll do paste instead
of that box there we now have a circle so i could repeat the process and do it for all of the kids
i could pull up hudson i actually like the circle it's actually not so bad so we're
gonna do go back to elliptical and actually if i wanted to do the lasso and spend some time
going here and just around his face because this is where hudson is gonna keep all of his documents
in this nice folder which i'm going to say i would never do just doing it for the purpose
of this video we'll copy this we're going to create a new folder we're going to call it hudson
we're going to get the information we're going to come up here we're going to do command v and so
now hudson has his picture right there so now all of these folders have that photograph if we want
to go back to the internet and find a different photograph we could pull up storm trooper
and maybe i want this as the image but again this takes me to targets we'll just try dragging the
photograph off to the desktop but that didn't work so let's try this one let's find out we'll go to
the finder desktop and here is that photograph but it is a w e p b file so let's see if we can
resave this we're going to go to markup because again i don't want this white background on
there we're going to go to instant alpha and slowly go in press delete on the keyboard
we're going to duplicate it as a tiff and just for reference tiff files and png files allow
you to have a transparent background meaning that it's going to be crystal clear for when
you save these images so if i go up to file and do export you'll notice here that under all of
these different formats notice the alpha button it allows you to have that alpha channel so jpeg
doesn't allow you to do that it's always going to be there but some of these other ones
like pdf png tiff files they allow you to have that that transparency so that it doesn't look
like clipart i prefer pngs and we're going to do storm trooper we could save it to the desktop
i'll click save and here's that file now i didn't really need to save that because all i need to do
is go up to file we're gonna or go up to edit do select all we're gonna copy this and then we can
go back to let's say hudson get info and select him in the top and do paste and then it would have
that as the icon for that particular uh external hard drive or folder and actually i could change
my time machine to that so let's go time machine we'll do info and select this do command v and
time machine is weird though i have found that depending on the operating system that you're at
you can't change the icon i haven't found the reason why or any documentation on it that's
just been my experience so if you can't change the icon on your time machine backup don't freak out
that's just the way the cookie crumbles so here i'll type in my computer password click ok and now
it's there i can even take it a whole another step further and maybe i wanted to say markup
let's go back to markup we're going to add some text and i'm going to actually
type in time machine backup and i could select the text here we'll bold it italicize it and now
put that right smack on his forehead we'll select all copy go back to this time machine folder
paste and now it's going to say time machine backup on the text on that icon it's kind of
small but you get the idea you can still see it so that's how you can take any of your own pictures
and customize the folders the external hard drives that you have and also keep in mind all of these
images that you have here on the operating system you can always get those as full size quality
images also so a lot of them that i the one that i like to use a lot is the little automator guy
so i'll take this do command i select this icon in the top left and do command c for copy and
then if i open up preview and i'm not opening up a file per se but if i go up to file because i've
already copied it if i say new from clipboard it's actually going to bring up that that icon
for me as an image then i can go up to file i can go down to export and then i can save it as png
and then i have that file saved so that's kind of nice you can take really any of these images
that are on your computer from any software that you have and that's a way that you can capture
that that image which is really nice and you can use it alter it edit it not that i recommend
that because that's probably copyrights in some way shape or form but that's how you do it so
andy m i hope that answered your question i hope for others that saw this you liked what you saw
you learned something if you did hit that little like button if you want to support the channel
hit that subscribe button i love making content for you guys and it's little fun tricks like this
that make it all worthwhile so again thank you so much for watching and we'll see you next time