A few days ago, MacThemes user spiralstairs released a set of Finder background images, entitled Shelves. Tell you what, it turns out it was just what I needed to change the look of my Leopard.
What’s the purpose of Shelves? It makes your Finder look as ordered as a nice, clean shelf of documents. And with a few tricks, you can apply that look to all your folders.
The basic idea is to make your Finder windows look like this:
The settings for this to work are simple: icon view, icon sizes of 128×128 pixels, maximum grid spacing, no “icon info” showing, and best keep it organised (by name here). You can apply these settings by hitting the keyboard combo “Cmd” + “J”, or going in “View => Show View Options” in the Finder.
Just like that, folders become beautiful. I found CoverFlow useful and icon view boring, but this has set a new paradigm.
However, applying it like that isn’t enough. There are a few additional steps to get it to work system-wide.
First, you need to change all the folders where you’ve set “always open with CoverFlow/list view/…”, because you want the default look to now show everywhere, right?
For that, fortunately, there is an Apple tool which you can use: Automator. Open Automator, start a workflow with “get specified Finder items”, then add a step “set folder views” (where you define the folder view just as stated beforehand). Check “apply changes to sub-folders” if you really want the changes to affect just about every folder you can possibly imagine.
Now, I got loads of errors trying to apply that workflow to the whole drive, even to folders containing loads of sub-folders, so this isn’t a perfect solution. Also, it takes time and uses up your CPU a lot. Basically, I found that it worked best if I already knew which were the folders where I’d been foolish enough to set “always open in CoverFlow”.
Next, you want this folder background to apply to the whole folder. The problem is that, if you have a folder with hundreds of items (like my “Applications” folder), the image will stop at some point (well, after 4000 pixels, to be more precise). This is a problem.
But there is a workaround: there’s a trick which allows you to force the Finder to loop any background images in icon view.
Before explaining how to do that, however, you need to fix the image, because it is a little too short to loop perfectly. The easiest way I found to fix the image was to cut off 178 pixels from the bottom, which gives a result you can download here if using the “Leather Shelves” (otherwise, you’ll have to fix the image yourselves).
Once that is done, and once you know you’ve applied the background image to all the important folders (and once you’ve made those settings the ones for the default folder [just hit the “use as defaults” button in the “Show View Options” window]), you need to apply the “hack” to make the background image work.
The way to get background images looping can be found here, as pointed out by MacThemes user Dustin. There’s one problem however: you need Property List Editor. This is a utility which comes with the Developer Tools, a set of things which are an optional install with Leopard. If you haven’t installed the Developer Tools, you can install them from your Leopard DVD, but it might be too much of a hassle just to get your background images looping…
So, here’s what you need to do, if you have Property List Editor.
- in the Finder, go to “~/Library/Preferences/” (your User library)
- find the “com.apple.finder.plist” file
- open it in Property List Editor
- hit “Dump”
- select all the resulting text
- copy it into a text file (in TextEdit, for example, but make sure you hit “Format => Make Plain Text” (“Shift” + “Cmd” + “T”)
- search “BackgroundFlags”
- the first two results should be in a section below “<key>DesktopViewOptions</key>”. Ignore those two results, and move on to the next one
- from the third BackgroundFlags onwards, change the following “<integer>0</integer>” into “<integer>1</integer>”.
Theoretically, that should do it. Just relaunch Finder (using the “Force Quit” window) or log off before logging in again to see the backgrounds start looping!
If this doesn’t seem to do the trick, try to find “<key>BackgroundPictureURL</key>”, and copy that and the following line (“<string>…</string>”) near every single instance where you changed the BackgroundFlags integer.
And there we go, you’ll have ordered your Finder a little more.
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