Image2Icon: Helpful App for file management on Mac OSX
Ok, so I initially tried this app simply for the fun of it but I did have the idea early on that maybe it could be helpful in organizing my projects…
You see, I’ve got a lot of art projects scattered about my Hard Drive that have been copied from drive to drive over the last few decades and are quite frankly, lucky to be alive but not organized at all. Several drive failures over the years, and you just sort of copy all of your stuff onto what other drives are available. Now that it’s all on a RAID drive, it’s been a bit easier to clean up. I should discuss this whole project organization project at some point, but this is about a handy little app that I felt was worth mentioning… Image2Icon.
Image2Icon app
The app is free (at the time of writing this, anyway), and was found on the Mac App Store. It’s simple… you just drag an image into the app window and you get several choices of how that image is made into an Icon (I usually just have the image mapped onto a folder icon, but there are some other fun ones.) Just drag anything onto the icon you want, and a moment later it changes.
The Icons don’t work too well over iCloud Drive, for instance if you are sharing a folder with someone, I’ve tried this and they won’t see your fancy icons. It can be a time consuming process to use this app for every project you have, but let me explain why it might be worth it.
Custom icons on some project folders. Some of these contain large 30GB+ files that take a long time to open, so this is very helpful.
So let’s say you are searching for some images you used on a project, and you can’t rmember exactly where they were or what they were called so you use a spotlight search to hunt them down. So let’s say you spot several folders with the name of the project, and you end up having to dig in each one to see which is the right one?.. Well, I’ve found that putting some sort of image related to the project on the folder, not only helps me identify at a glance, but also gives me a visual reference as to which folder is the “real” one. Sometimes you can’t change the names of folders, depending on which apps are referencing files in them, so that’s not always an option.
Now I don’t even need to open the folder to know the differences between versions, and I din’t have to rename anything.
I’m finding it helpful to add images to the folder’s icons in my quest to sort through all of these art projects i’ve been making and saving through the years. It’s helped me tell which folders are for which, without having to add long names to the folders.