Want to change your Dock icons in Mac OS X? It’s pretty simple, if not obvious. Here’s how:

  1. Find the icon you want to use and copy it (Cmd+C).
  2. Find the application for which you want to use this new icon in Finder’s “Application” folder.
  3. Right-click the application and choose “Get Info”.
  4. Select the existing application icon in the top left corner of the “Get Info” pop-up window by single-clicking it.
  5. Paste your new icon (Cmd+V) over it.

If the application you chose is in your Dock, you might have to restart the Dock to get your new icon to appear. To do that, open Terminal and type: “killall -KILL Dock” (without the quotes). Your Dock should immediately restart. Click the application and your new icon will appear.


To revert to the application’s default icon, select the icon in the top left corner of the “Get Info” window and delete it by pressing the Delete key.


There are 6 comments on this post

  1. Thanks for the info, however, I was not able to change my System Preferences icon. Even after unlocking it would not accept the change…any suggestions?
    Ciao!

  2. Great tip about Dock, thanks. And if you need pictures for your article, feel free to grab ours: http://www.visualpharm.com/articles/change_mac_icons.html

  3. 🙂 thank you!

  4. […] If you’re using OSX, there’s a great tutorial here. […]

  5. […] If you’re using OSX, there’s a great tutorial here. […]

  6. Once you open an app and it is sitting on the dock, click once using 2 fingers and it will bring up the option to keep on the Dock 🙂 Same rule applies for removing them off the dock.

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