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Did you know that you could design your own file icons using images/photos of your own making? It is a capability built into the powerful UNIX/Mac OSX core -- and possibly in older OSs as well, but I never tried it before although I always wanted to..
This is what the right side of my dock looked like -- the five generic folder icons contain all of my [from left to right]
1 - eBay files going back many years,
2 - digital photo apps and originals from my Nikon and Kodak digital cameras,
3 - all of my Kardas.net files which number in the thousands,
4 - saved emails and Instant Messages worth keeping for posterity according to person/general topic, and
5 - all of the files in my several web domains/web sites/dotMac pages, etc. -- but the icons are the usual generic images of a file folder -- how can one personalize them just a tad? The remaining two on the right are the system icons for my computer home material (which I basically use in place of the Apple Menu Items list from my old TiBook running OS9.3), and last but not least, the neato trash icon.
Curiously, many peeps I know always clicked their hard drive on OS9.3 to start doing anything -- I had my most used things right on my Apple Menu list, which was a lot more convenient than rummaging through the loads of individual elements which appear on that hard drive, which I very rarely visited.
Incidently, this is what the Home on my new eMac contains -- basically my most used applications and files, and where I stash most things on a daily basis after saving them to my desktop -- the ones that Apple provides, the 7 on the left of the bottom row, I do not use for anything because I had it all already organized my way in my own folders
How to Personalize Your Icons
One way to personalize these icons in OSX might be to obtain some CD or download someone else's shareware files which contain ready made icons.
Another method is to use your own graphics, whether photos or drawings/sketches, or even just a text gif, which is easy enough to do --
1) find a graphic file that sort of matches or connects somehow to the contents of the folder -- for my photo folder I chose a pic of a ceramic tile a friend gave me from Arizona that has a nice southwest conjunction of images -- a skull, American Indian silver jewelry, a cactus and an Indian rug
2) you then have to resize it to a square 128x128 pixels -- in cases in which the original pic is not square, this step simply distorts it a little -- now pay attention -- the next steps may appear slightly confusing, just follow them as stated below -- practice on some files that, if you make a mistake, it does not matter that much, you can simply trash them -- all of this techy stuff takes getting used to, but with a little practice it will become second nature
3) highlight the pic file -- hold down the Option button, go to File and select Show Inspector
4) the vertical inspector screen pops up -- highlight the small icon at the top of that window, go to Edit ----> Copy
5) click the icon that you want to change, in this case a folder icon -- it now automatically appears in the new revised inspector window
6) click the small upper icon of the file folder -- Edit ---> Paste
You have now created your very own icon for that particular folder -- and probably had fun doing it -- that is what these toys are all about!
My resulting dock icons now reflect the changes I made to the 5 previously generic folder icons, and I changed their relative position to have my Home in the center
from left to right -- eBay [simply using an old logo image I already had in my files and making it square, the size as stated above] --> photos [the above tile image]--> Kardas.net [a photo of me] --> Home --> emails + IMs [a cute dinosaur delivering mail], my domain files [using the icon for Adobe PageMill v3, which I use to develop my web sites and ebay item descriptions], and of course, the trash
Now the icons themselves give me an indication as to what is contained in the folders, which saves me that extra click to find the same things in my cute little house
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