How to Change Icons in Mac OS X

There are some icons in Mac OS X that are a little tougher than others to change, but most of the desktop icons, especially those for user documents and directories, are easy to change.

Mac OS X provides a context menu for each desktop icon displayed by the Finder application that includes a menu item called "Get Info." It is usually the second item on the menu. Get info displays a rather comprehensive list of configurable information about a document or a folder, and also displays the document or directory's icon at the top.

This is where you can change an icon, believe it or not. By selecting the icon in the "Get Info" window, with a mouse left-click, it will cause a blue border to appear. Using the keyboard combination of [Apple Key ] + C (the standard copy text command) you can "copy" the icon. Then, by opening another Get Info window and highlighting the icon in the same way, you can use the standard paste text command, [Apple Key ] + V, to paste the icon for the other document.