An Easy Way To Add Icons To The Icon Chooser

Tips & Tutorials
1

Hey Everyone,

I came here looking for some macro info and saw a thread about the Icon Chooser. If you’re having trouble adding icons, there’s an easy way to do it.

If you have the .icns file for the icon you want to add, follow these steps:

  1. Open the .icns file (Preview works greats for this). The top level file in the stack is always the highest-res version
  2. Export that top file as a .png
  3. Make a folder in your Applications folder called “Keyboard Maestro Icons” or something like that
  4. Move the .icns file you started with into that folder and add the extension .app to it
  5. Choose Get Info for the .icns.app file you just appended and drag the PNG you just made to the icon square in the Get Info window.
  6. Open Keyboard Maestro. The icon is in the Icon Chooser

The whole process takes about 30 seconds. I’ve done this for a while it’s always worked. I just leave the folder of those appended files in my Applications folder so they’re always in the Icon Chooser. I’ve added hundreds of them.

Finding all of the .icns files on your computer is pretty easy if you don’t know how to do it.

For one-offs, look in the application’s Resource folder: Highlight App>Right-Click>Choose ‘Show Package Contents’>Contents>Resources>Look for the .icns file and option-copy it to a location where you want to keep it. It might have a generic name like “AppIcn” or something like that.

To find every .icns file on your computer (this includes icons for EVERYTHING on your Mac), the best way is to use a third-party search tool like Houdah Spot, Asset Catalog Tinkerer or Icon Generator, but if you want to use Find on MacOS, you have to tweak the Search setup a bit because Spotlight doesn’t index system files. Make sure the Find is set to “This Mac” and click the + button to add a criteria. Click on the leftmost dropdown (it usually says “Kind” by default) and choose “Other…” When the list pops up, scroll down and check “System Files.” Then go back to the main window and make sure your criteria is set to include “System Files” “Are Included.’ Enter the search term “.icns” and all of the available files should appear. This doesn’t always work using the built-in search in MacOS and it might take a few tries changing up the search parameters to get it to display the icns files. It all depends on how Spotlight has indexed your drive. That’s why I would suggest using something third-party because everything shows up right away.

Cheers

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Have you checked this out?

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This is cool. I didn’t know it existed. I had figured out the way I did it because I was stuck and had to use the tools in front of me. Thanks for pointing this out.

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