Mac 101: Changing the size of your icons
Finder's View Options allow you to control the way your icons look on your desktop and in your folders. You can zoom your icons all the way up to a hefty 128x128 (shown here) or shrink them down to a modest 16x16. There are tradeoffs of course. Smaller icons let you see more files at once while large icons better allow you to preview your files, especially pictures. You can easily experiment with changing your icon sizes as follows.
In Finder, select View -> Show View Options (or just press Command-J). The options are slightly different for items on your desktop (left) and folders (right).
Use the Small/Large slider to select the size of your icons. If you do not want to affect the size of every icon on your computer, make sure to select "This window only" rather than "All windows" when adjusting the icon size in folders.
The Text size pop-ups allow you to adjust the font size associated with the icons, so you can balance your labels with your images. Select where you want the labels to appear by choosing either Bottom or Right.
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Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
leo said 7:49PM on 4-16-2007
What happened to TUAW? This is... crap.
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Josh said 8:26PM on 4-16-2007
Yeah... that was like the most obvious feature ever explained.
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Jon said 9:22PM on 4-16-2007
Crap? This is great. I just had a switcher friend tell me he really misses the Thumbnail option in Windows, it would make it a lot easier to organize his photos. This tip gets around that a bit. Thumbnail view would still be better, but at least there's an option.
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Twoworms said 8:32PM on 4-16-2007
I agree that this isn't crap at all. We could all use a little mac 101 reminders. Plus what a great feature for new mac users/switchers. Again, kudos to TUAW.
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Maddles said 9:39PM on 4-16-2007
#1 and #2, you do realise this is Mac 101? Meaning basic Mac features and other stuff most Mac users already know but switchers don't.
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david vatran said 10:22PM on 4-16-2007
erica, how do i change just one icon to be larger, i remember a tip to be able to do this back in 10.1 days,
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scott said 1:30AM on 4-17-2007
What bothers me is that new icons don't seem to be popping up as often. I don't know why, but the icon craze with slews of new sets each weeks seems to have weened.
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j.warmerdam said 2:49AM on 4-17-2007
Somehow I don't have a slider option, just radio buttons for small icon and large icon.
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Chris said 3:48AM on 4-17-2007
This isn't as useful as it could be. Unfortunately reducing the icon size doesn't greatly increase the number you can get in view as the column spacing doesn't change (or not by enough), meaning that you just end up with lots of blank, useless whitespace inbetween tiny icons. Maybe Leopard will bring a Finder re-vamp to cure that.
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Dave said 6:42AM on 4-17-2007
@jwarmerdam - you have your window in list view, which only offers two preset icon sizes. The slider's only available when the window is in icon view.
And @1 & 2 - jeez, guys - this is Mac 101. Basics. For people who don't know this stuff.
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Mike said 7:37AM on 4-17-2007
The only thought I had when looking at that screenshot was: how does Erica get Chandler to run?
I tried it. I've never used such a buggy and unstable program on *any* platform. After the first few crashes, it began to crash automatically on every single launch.
I can tell you it didn't stay in ~/Applications long.
Anyone that can use that program must have a serious amount of hair on their chest or have sold their soul to the devil.
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Elliot said 12:02PM on 4-17-2007
Does anyone know a way to decrease the spacing between icons on the desktop when "snap to grid" is selected? It seems to be set up so that the spacing's fine for large icons, but too big for smaller icons.
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steve mcfarland said 1:39PM on 4-17-2007
Elliot, "Fall 2007" holds an elegant answer to that problem.
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scralpha said 1:56PM on 4-17-2007
Elliot, I think Mac Pilot will allow you to do what you're looking for systemwide, but not on a per-folder basis. Maybe some of the other apps like this (Cocktail, TinkerTool, Onyx) do it too?
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rp said 2:00PM on 4-17-2007
As a long-time Mac user I think that it is important to offer these little tidbits of information for newbies. People in the know can always just skip over the article.
However, I have seen some recent articles which try to give ideas (organizational mostly) that are entirely pointless and have no place in the Mac community, and I will continue to point those out as ridiculous and un-Maclike.
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leo said 3:08PM on 4-17-2007
#15: oh come on, I'm a recent switcher too. It took me one minute to figure this out... we shouldn't need to explain this kind of thing.
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VanillaSpice said 12:19AM on 4-18-2007
#1, what happened is that TUAW started a Mac 101 series.
#2, explanation of the most obvious features is a defining characteristic of 101 courses.
#15, everyone is different. Some people will figure out feature X but not Y, and others will stumble upon Y but need to be told about X. I've been using OSX since its release, but I am still occasionally finding out about new features that I am sure many others long ago discovered.
It'd be a shame if no-one ever wrote about a great feature that you'd find really useful, just because they assumed that everyone would figure it out.
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VanillaSpice said 12:25AM on 4-18-2007
Whoops, sorry, that last point of mine was addressing #16, not #15.
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