Custom folder icons are blurry

Still an issue after Mojave update #2 - After reading all the responses on this and other like postings, here's my simple work around to avoid the blurred folder icons - especially for those who never have done this before.

1) Select potential icon picture & open it in the Preview app (JPG, PNG and TIF work well)

2) Hover mouse cursor over the open Preview window of the selected pic

3) index finger mouse click and hold while moving the mouse in expanding the crop frame

4) Crop the picture to a square frame having the same exact number of pixels on both sides - Preview will show a tiny "X by Y" pixel counter next to the crop frame - so no need to guess. Any square crop with sides up to 1600 pixels have worked for me...

5) Release the index finger button on the mouse to stop the crop once the right square dimensions are reached

6) Hover back over the crop area (cursor will change to a hand) - index finger mouse click and hold to position the crop area to 'taste', then release the mouse button

7) With the Preview crop window still active - Use "CMD" "C" keys together to copy the cropped area to the clipboard

8) Select/highlight the folder in Finder or Desktop that the picture icon is to be copied to clicking the index finger mouse button

9) Use "CMD" "I" keys together to open up the 'Get Info' window for the selected folder

10) At the very top of the selected folders' 'Get Info' window will be a tiny folder icon - index finger mouse button click on this folder and it will select it and highlight - do not click on the larger preview icon further down the window it will not do anything

11) With the "Get Info' window still active and the top folder icon highlighted, use "CMD" "V" keys together to paste the cropped area from the clipboard and replace the folder icon with it. The preview window and folder icon should change to reflect the non-blurred paste if you followed the above directions.

12) If you have multiple folders that require the same cropped image simply repeat steps 8-11 on the required folders one at a time as the original cropped image is retained on the clipboard until replaced by another or the computer is shut down.

If you do not want a blurred image, you can use any type of picture even your own vector drawing if you follow following procedure:

Go to folder /System/Library/CoreServices/CoreTypes.bundle/Contents/Resources.

Copy the file Multipleitemsicon.icns to your desktop.

Open e.g Powerpoint app and insert the icns file.

Expand the resolution to 1024 x 768

Then put the image you want on top of the icon image (can be another inserted image or a new drawing).

Now put the transparancy of the icon image to 100% and group it with your own image.

Now save the group as a PNG file.

Open the PNG file in preview app.

Select the image and copy to the clipboard.

Paste from the "get info" of your file.

Now you have a high resolution image to replace the file icon.

Such intractable and mysterious problems mean that I’ll never give myself another Apple Macintosh computer.

Cupertino apparently doesn’t want to sell its Macintosh computers.

The last remark that I received from an Apple-employed person (he sounded as if he was a quarter my age) about my damaged icons was words to the effect that I was imagining the problem (I seem to remember that he said “That’s your opinion”).

I had no answer to such a you’re-only-a-customer attitude, so I had to (politely enough, but tersely) end the phonecall.

Well said Leigh and exactly what most of us think. Steve Jobs cared about the product and cared about the users. Tim Cook struts and preens and displays his ignorance on stage and figures every apple customer is his for life. The “genius” support people are barely trained and so full of the “geniuses” idea they never listen to long time users.

i don’t know who will come out with a product we can love, but the time is here.

My my first Mac was 1993 and my last Mac was 2017.

Well you are certainly not talking for all of us !! If you think the support of the competition is so much better then be my guest.

There you pay a premium price for every system upgrade and are not sure you can start your system after upgrading . You even have to take a payed subscribtion to get function updates for most of their products.

I suggest you refrain from these type of comments on this forum, because they do not add any value towards a solution of somebodys problem.

A sterling post, Mr Hill. Thanks. (But I suppose your nom-de-guerre isn’t a mix of Stirling Moss and Graham Hill, is it? Anyway, you’re driving in the right direction.)

The cute rules of business in Cupertino:

The most intelligent customers are wrong. When we’re on to a good thing (for instance Mountain Lion and all the user-friendliness that came with it), let the vandals in. Complicate things so much that a new Mac-OS causes strife for users of a previous one. Make things difficult or impossible. Fail to explain things. Fail to give answers to common questions. Frustrate our most faithful customers by failing to arm our staff and the independent Apple-retailers with the wherewithal to help those customers. Fail to invite customers to bring their problems to a named Apple employee who’s equipped to solve them.

too funny Leigh - My name was (Ms) Sterling Marsh and I married George Hill and became Sterling Hill - my husband was an airline pilot who raced as a hobby so we had a lot of racing friends who really hooted at my new name! "Hey if Stirling Moss married Graham Hill... har har har"

I find the lack of customer support to be terribly frustrating. I do not know what the solution is. I've used macs and pcs and spent years and years on Unix workstations - I did broadcast animation for 25 years. I hate to have the little cretins say "is it plugged in?" and for one of them to tell you "That’s your opinion”...(?) I had a serious problem with being unable to boot from a secondary drive with ancient adobe software (on a mac boot drive) with my new iMac. I had to go through about 20 of them until I actually got to an engineer who worked on the mechanics and was told - "no you can't do that because the mechanics were redesigned to prevent you from doing that" but it was a hard haul for sure. I really hate tech support.

I'd like to see some competition. I have the iMac, the watch 4, the iPads, the Big X and I love them all but I sure wouldn't want to buy apple stock these days.

Rogier - hahahahahahahaha - I was sure not supporting any PCs... maybe you could go back an re-read what I said.

have to take a payed subscribtion to get function updates for most of their products.

have you heard of Adobe?

because they do not add any value towards a solution of somebodys problem.

I actually DID post a solution to this problem of blurry icons that actually does - yes - work. And having been a mac user for over 26 years, I have solved a number of problems on different forums/questions.

I was able to draw something in illustrator and drag the graphic I created to the icon in get info without even coming out of Illustrator. In fact with each upgrade it's getting worse. Come on Apple tell us how to fix this!!!! It has to be a setting, because it started happening when I tried to put an icon in one that worked well on my old MAC but caused this problem on the new MAC.

A perfect square is the answer! I've always used Pages to create my icons and as soon as I made sure the icon (or group) was a perfect square, I could once again copy/paste that right into Finder> Get Info. Thanks for the tip!

I found something that works for most images, but not all.

Since I don't have photoshop, I opened up the transparent png image that I was going to be using in preview. Then I went into tools, and then into adjust size. I then unchecked the box scale proportionally, and went and put in the dimensions : 512x512 pixels (width and height) and 144 pixels/cm (resolution). I then did the command+a, command+c and then went to the folder, pressed command+i and then clicked on the folder icon and did command+v.

As far as I know, this works better with transparent png images than just normal images, so tell me if you had any luck.

Hope this helps!

I've had this problem for a little while - some custom icons always end up blurry.

The answer I have discovered is that it doesnt matter what size or resolution the image is, when you paste it into the icon box, but what matters is that it it square. Even if the dimensions are out by one pixel, thats enough for it to resample the image so it is square again, and thus... blurry.

Photoshop can help - change the canvas size to match the smallest or biggest dimension, then copy/paste from there.

I was changing the icons in OS 7 or 8 (I can't remember for sure) in the late 90's. Funny thing is that I can change the Icons on my 6 year old MB Air with Mojave (home) yet my 1 year old MB Pro (work) I can't change the Icons with out them being blurry.

Any ideas?

Yes, thanks, that workaround is known. You do not have to work with photoshop, powerpoint or keynote can achieve the same result. It is that in Sierra and High Sierra any copy and paste gave a scharp image and the restriction of a square image was introduced with Mojave. So it remains a Mojave problem.

The image should be 512x512 or 1024x1024.