# El Capitan system folder icons



## Anonymosity (Jun 8, 2010)

Using Mac OS El Capitan, I changed some system folder icons in /System/Library/CoreServices/CoreTypes.bundle/Contents/Resources to full-colour folder images. For instance, I changed ApplicationsFolderIcon.icns to put a full-colour image on it rather than a silhouette. These images do not appear in the Mac interface. That worked with Mac OS Snow Leopard, but not in El Capitan. Why are the folder images in there if they are not used, and where are the actual system folder images really located?


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## sinclair_tm (Mar 11, 2005)

Starting with OS X Lion, Apple caches all the system resources. This was done to prevent messing with and damaging the system (And hence people like you and me making changes to the look and feel of the OS. I would make the About This Mac and other dialog boxes a transparent black, change the default login screen, and also have some custom icons.). I messed with it for a bit but was never able to figure out how to force the OS to reload the resources after I made a change and gave up as a reboot would undo any changes I did make. IMHO, Snow Leopard was the last power user friendly version of OS X.


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## Anonymosity (Jun 8, 2010)

With the folders, I found it possible to change them with Get Info, sometimes having to unlock the system folders and allow my user to change the icons, then relocking again. That does not work with sidebar icons, however. The grey icons in the Finder sidebar are apparently not in the caches. I tried deleting the caches from the root library, the system library and my user library, after replacing the grey system icons with full-colour ones in the CoreTypes.bundle, and the grey icons did not go away.


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