MacOS – How to restore Yosemite finder sidebar icons after changing folders with symlinks

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After I installed on my mac a second drive I figured out it was a good idea to use the old HD for storage. So I symlinked ~/Downloads, ~/Documents, ~/Music, ~/Pictures and ~/Movies in order for them to be actually located in the old HD, while I'm using the new SSD as a startup disk.
Everything works remarkably ok, except, now the icons in the finder sidebar for those folders are the default ones:

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Even though in the finder preference the icons are ok:

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I already tried this answer but I was only able to restore both the actual folder icons, but not the icons in the sidebar!

Best Answer

It might be the case that, unfortunately, you can't do this. See this answer: How come Dropbox gets an icon in Finder sidebar?

and this one: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/8380562/adding-buttons-to-finder-toolbar

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MacOS – Change Mac OS X Finder sidebar icons

This isn't an answer but it does add some information. The value associated with the com.apple.LSSharedFileList.TemplateSystemSelector key, 1935819875, is a decimal representation of the file type. In hex, it is 0x73624463, which are the ascii letters 'sbDc'. This file type is described in /System/Library/CoreServices/CoreTypes.bundle/Contents/Info.plist. This is a binary plist that you can convert to xml using plutil -convert xml1 -o Info.plist.xml Info.plist. Looking in the Info.plist.xml file, you can see a dictionary at the top level. Inside this there is a key "CFBundleDocumentTypes" and an array of dictionaries as its value. In this array is a dictionary that contains the following:

<dict>
    <key>CFBundleTypeIconFile</key>
    <string>SidebarDocumentsFolder.icns</string>
    <key>CFBundleTypeName</key>
    <string>Sidebar Documents Folder Icon</string>
    <key>CFBundleTypeOSTypes</key>
    <array>
        <string>sbDc</string>
    </array>
    <key>CFBundleTypeRole</key>
    <string>None</string>
    <key>LSTypeIsPackage</key>
    <false/>
    <key>NSPersistentStoreTypeKey</key>
    <string>Binary</string>
</dict>

An interesting key/value pair in this dictionary is CFBundleTypeIconFile: SidebarDocumentsFolder.icns. This file can be found at /System/Library/CoreServices/CoreTypes.bundle/Contents/Resources/SidebarDocumentsFolder.icns and it contains the icons used for document folders.

I would think that changing the com.apple.LSSharedFileList.TemplateSystemSelector value to a different value, or updating the dictionary for 'sbDc' to refer to a different icns file would get you on your way to having custom icons.

MacOS – Symlinked Movies and Downloads. Restore icons

I did the same for the applications folder, and the way to get the icon was to copy/paste the original icon to the (new) original folder, the symlink regained the icon automatically and instantly.

The name of the symLink can be edited without problem, if it needs to be in the translated version, just translate the symLinked folder.

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MacOS – Change Mac OS X Finder sidebar icons

MacOS – Symlinked Movies and Downloads. Restore icons

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