Make ‘em Pop: Colorize Your Folders

Ever look at your Windows folders and just see a sea of yellow? What if you could color-code your folders?

You have a couple options. Rainbow Folders (free) is an older program that still works just fine in Windows 7. In this post, though, I’m going to cover Folderico (also free) since it’s optimized for Windows 7.

Once downloaded and installed, right click on the folder you’d like to change. Mouse over “Folderico,” then select the icon you’d like to use. I’m going with violet for my Psych 100 folder.

And this is what it now looks like.

To change themes, when you right-click and select Folderico, select “Change theme.” You can choose from these two. (Visit this website to download more themes.) Selecting a theme doesn’t change all of your folders. It just provides the icons you can choose from. You can have folders with different icons from different themes.

Quick tip: If you share folders using Dropbox, the icon Dropbox uses puts two little people in the bottom right corner of the icon as a reminder that this is a shared folder. If you change the icon on a shared folder, the little people will disappear, and you may forget that it is indeed a shared folder. For the sake of simplicity, I recommend against changing those icons. (Still not using Dropbox? Read more about Dropbox.)

Happy color coding!

For the curious, the little green dot in the bottom left corner of my folders is courtesy of Carbonite, my online backup service. That tells me the backup is current for the files in that folder. (While I’m an advocate for Dropbox, the free version of Dropbox limits how much space I have. Since I want my entire hard drive backed up, I use Carbonite which gives me much more space.)