MacOS – How to restore the default folder icon

Snow Leopard had a funny way of arranging and organizing Finder views. But we got used to them; however, that doesn't mean they were even remotely intuitive. Lion builds on this confusing and awkward system, changing things up again.

You can see in the image above that there are now two separate options that pertain to the Finder view settings:

1. Always open in icon view
2. Browse in icon view

The first applies to the current directory (in this case my Downloads folder will always present my icons in Icon View, at a size of 48x48, etc.), while the second applies to all child (or sub-) folders. However, and this is what most people are stumbling over, the "Browse in ... view" is overridden by that folders "Always open in ... view."

Let's run through an example:

You have a folder called Downloads. And in that folder you have another folder called PDFs. You apply both of the above settings to Downloads folder. Now you open the PDFs folder and apple "Always open in list view." You close Finder and open a new window. Navigating to your Downloads folder, will show all its contents as icons, while navigating to the PDFs folder, will show a list view. So now you have the parent folder (Downloads) with both settings enabled, but when you open the child folder (PDFs), it opens in list view.

If you understand the behaviour, it makes sense, but if it's lost on you (trust me, it is on a lot of users as it is far from being an intuitive system), then you'd be scratching your head why both the options are checked, but PDFs opens in list view.

If you are simply trying to change the default icon to something else, here is an answer I provided for a previous post. I have used this to customize several icons in the Finder's sidebar.