Give the folders in macOS Finder's sidebar the icons you want, instead of identical grey folders.

Pick a folder, pick an icon - any SF Symbol, or any SVG of your own - and SidebarFavorites puts the folder in Finder's sidebar with that icon on it.

• Works for local folders, iCloud Drive, and ~/Library/CloudStorage (Google Drive, Dropbox, OneDrive, …), and for mounted disks and network shares.
• Nothing to enable in System Settings. No Finder extensions are involved.
• Nothing runs in the background. Icons survive reboots and Finder restarts on their own.
• The app adds and removes the sidebar row for you. Rows you added yourself are left where they are - it only puts an icon on them.

The app is only needed when you want to add, edit or remove a favorite. Quit it and the icons stay.

brew tap ivg-design/tap
brew trust ivg-design/tap
brew install --cask sidebarfavorites

brew trust is required once - Homebrew asks you to explicitly trust a third-party tap before it will load casks from it.

1. Download the latest DMG from Releases.
2. Drag SidebarFavorites Manager to Applications.
3. Open it.

Releases are Developer ID signed, notarized and stapled, so it opens normally - there is no Gatekeeper detour and no "Open Anyway" step.

Requires macOS 13.0 (Ventura) or later.

1. Click + (or press ⌘N).
2. Give it a name and pick the folder (Browse, or type a path - ~ works).
3. Choose the icon:
   • SF Symbol - type a name like hammer.fill or star.circle, or click one of the quick picks.
   • Custom SVG - click Import SVG… and pick any SVG file.
4. Add. The folder appears in Finder's sidebar with your icon.

If Finder is still showing an old icon, a banner appears with a Restart Finder button. The app never restarts Finder on its own.

Import any ordinary SVG - a logo, an icon you drew, anything made of vector shapes. There is nothing to prepare: no SF Symbols template to export, no guide boxes to draw inside, no naming field to get right. The app parses the file, flattens it to a single outline and builds the SF Symbol around it.

• Live preview. You see the exact silhouette that will ship, both enlarged and in a mock sidebar row at the real 16 pt size.
• Size slider (50-150%). 100% is exactly the size of a system SF Symbol - the right measurement, not always the right look, since a wide or busy mark reads heavier than a sparse one at the same size. Nudge it until it sits comfortably next to the rest of the sidebar; the preview follows as you drag.
• Apply saves, rebuilds the icon and restarts Finder in one click without closing the sheet, so you can tune the size against the real sidebar.
• No Xcode required. Custom icons are compiled by the asset-catalog engine that ships with macOS itself. (Before 1.1 this needed actool, which only exists inside Xcode.)
• The app tells you what it had to drop or flatten: embedded photos and PNGs (a symbol cannot contain raster), live text that was never outlined, colours and gradients, and artwork too fine, too dense or too wide to read at sidebar size. These are warnings, not rejections.

Sidebar icons are always monochrome. Finder draws them as a flat silhouette tinted to match the sidebar. Colour is impossible there - that is a macOS rule, not a limitation of this app. The preview shows you the silhouette, so there are no surprises.

Folders in iCloud Drive and ~/Library/CloudStorage work exactly like local ones. This did not work in any version before 1.0 - those paths are virtual FileProvider mounts that Finder Sync extensions cannot see, and the old mechanism depended on such an extension. The symlink workaround the old README described is no longer needed; if you set one up, the favorite pointing at it keeps working, and you can also just point it at the real folder now.

A mounted disk or server can carry a custom icon too. Finder already lists every mounted volume under Locations, so a volume favorite offers a choice:

• Leave it off and the app adds a row under Favorites and icons Finder's Locations row to match, so both agree.
• Show in Locations only and no Favorites row is added at all - the app just icons the row Finder already shows.

Finder owns the rows in Locations, so the app only ever patches one in place. It never inserts, moves or deletes a row there, and the row is handed back untouched when the favorite is disabled or removed. Finder's synthesised entries - iCloud Drive, Computer, AirDrop, Network and the cloud-provider rows - cannot take a custom icon at all; macOS stores one and never draws it, so the app leaves them alone.

If a sidebar icon reverts every time you copy something into the folder, the folder (or disk) has a custom icon of its own - the kind you set by pasting into Get Info. On macOS 26, Finder redraws a sidebar row from its target's own icon whenever that target changes, and discards the icon this app set.

The app detects this and offers to fix it: open the favorite and choose Remove Its Icon. The icon is copied to ~/Library/Application Support/SidebarFavorites/IconBackups/ first, so nothing is lost. This costs you nothing you can see in the sidebar, because Finder never draws those icons there.

Pressing Refresh puts a wiped icon back immediately, but the folder's own icon has to go for it to stay.

Every row in Finder's Favorites list can carry a private per-item property, com.apple.LSSharedFileList.OverrideIcon.OSType, holding a four-character code. Finder resolves that code to an icon through Launch Services. SidebarFavorites allocates one such code per favorite, sets it on the row, and installs a single small helper bundle at:

~/Library/Application Support/SidebarFavorites/SidebarFavoritesIcons.app

That bundle declares one UTI per favorite, tagging it with the favorite's code and pointing it at an SF Symbol. It contains no executable code of any kind - its "executable" is a 17-byte #!/bin/sh no-op that exists only so macOS registers the bundle - and it is never launched. Custom SVGs are compiled into a symbol catalog inside it with actool. That is the whole mechanism: no extension, no daemon, no login item, no launch agent.

Configuration lives in ~/Library/Application Support/SidebarFavorites/config.json, and imported artwork in Icons/ alongside it. Settings links straight to the helper bundle so you can see it for yourself.

1. In the app, delete your favorites. This removes the sidebar rows the app added and restores the original icon on rows you added yourself. (Settings → Remove All Sidebar Icons does the same in one step and also deletes the helper bundle; it tells you exactly what it will do first.)
2. Drag SidebarFavorites Manager to the Trash.
3. Optionally delete ~/Library/Application Support/SidebarFavorites.

Requires Xcode 15+ and XcodeGen.

git clone https://github.com/ivg-design/SidebarFavorites.git
cd SidebarFavorites
brew install xcodegen        # if needed
xcodegen generate
xcodebuild -scheme SidebarFavoritesManager -configuration Release

To produce a distributable DMG:

./scripts/build-release.sh

The script finds a Developer ID Application identity in your keychain and signs with it (hardened runtime, timestamped), falling back to ad-hoc signing with a warning if there is none. Override it with SIGN_IDENTITY="Developer ID Application: Your Name (TEAMID)".

Notarization runs automatically when a Developer ID identity and a notarization keychain profile are both available; set NOTARIZE=0 to skip it. The profile defaults to SidebarFavoritesNotary (override with NOTARY_PROFILE) and is created once per machine - run this yourself in Terminal, it stores an app-specific password in your keychain:

xcrun notarytool store-credentials SidebarFavoritesNotary \
    --apple-id "you@example.com" \
    --team-id "TEAMID" \
    --password "app-specific-password"

nix run github:ivg-design/SidebarFavorites

This installs the released DMG rather than building from source, and nix/default.nix is currently pinned to an older release. Thanks to @rohanp2051 for the initial Nix package.

• Architecture - how the icon mechanism, the SVG pipeline and the migration work, for contributors.
• Changelog

• Inspired by rknightuk/custom-finder-sidebar-icons
• Uses Apple's SF Symbols

MIT - see LICENSE.

Note: This project is not affiliated with Apple Inc. SF Symbols is a trademark of Apple Inc.