#QuickTips with Jacob

Helping you make the most of your iPhone, iPad and Mac

Manilla #QuickTip

Recolour your Folder Icons in Two Clicks

24th April 2022

Jacob Woolcock

0:00

Sometimes it can be hard to find the folder you’re looking for – particularly when they all look the same. Adding a coloured ‘Tag’ helps a little bit, but it’s not great. Luckily, a free masOS utility called Manilla is available to fix that problem by quickly and efficiently recolouring your folder icons.

You can download Manilla here: https://github.com/neilsardesai/Manila

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Video Transcript

Here’s a great little utility that will help you change your folder colours on macOS Monterey.

Here’s how it works.

Normally all you can really do with your folders is add a coloured tag to them.

Now whilst this can help set them apart slightly, it does make it hard to find – especially when you’ve got hundreds of blue folders all in your Finder.

I’m going to show you a really clever app and it’s completely free called Manila.

Now this app isn’t on the App Store, instead you have to follow the link in the description to a GitHub page.

Don’t be scared by that, it’s really simple to install!

So on this page all you need to do is press the Download button here.

And then when you’ve done that press the Downloads button in the top of Safari, and then press the little magnifying glass to open that download in the Downloads folder.

Now from here all you need to do is drag that Manila application into your Applications folder – just like this.

Then navigate to your Applications folder, find the application called Manila and double click on it to open.

You’ll need to confirm that you’re happy to go ahead and open this because you’ve downloaded it from the internet.

Let me just close down a couple of windows make it clear on my screen.

Okay, and now we’re in Manila there’s one last piece of setup required – and again it’s really simple.

Press the Apple menu in the top left corner and go down to System Preferences.

From here you want to find the Extensions setting.

I’m going to search in the corner and then click on Extensions.

Now, Manila is what’s called a Finder Extension (a bit like a Safari Extension on the web browser) and it adds extra features into Finder.

So we’re going to go on to there and we’re going to tick the box to enable this Finder Extension.

And that’s all we have to do.

I’m going to close down those windows and now I’m going into my Finder with these four blue folders.

As soon as I like click on one of these Manila will ask for one last permission to access these files.

Grant that permission and now on that context menu (on the right click menu) there’s a new option called Colour.

As quickly as this you can choose a colour and, boom, that folder is now completely recoloured for you!

And again I can right click on a different folder (or press ctrl-click) and I can go onto the Colour menu and choose another colour.

Those folders now look instantly recognisable and it’s much easier to find the folder you need when it’s colour coded.

I hope you found this video helpful.

There are literally hundreds more on my YouTube channel down below so make sure you head over there now.

I’ll see you next time!

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