Set Custom Icon for Certain Folders in GNOME (Ubuntu, Fedora, etc)

Want to make some folders outstanding? This simple tutorial shows you how to set custom icon for individual folder in Linux with GNOME Desktop.

NOTE: This tutorial is tested and works in Ubuntu, Fedora, Debian, and Manjaro Linux with GNOME Desktop using default Nautilus file manager.

Set Custom Folder Icon in GNOME

  1. First, open ‘Files’ (aka Nautilus file manager) and right-click on the destination folder. Then, click open the “Properties” dialog.

  1. When the Properties dialog opens, just click on the folder icon. It will pop-up a new file-choose dialog for you.

  1. In the file chooser dialog, navigate and find out your desired icon, and finally click “Open” to use as the folder icon.

NOTE: The icon can be one of theme icons under /usr/share/icons, or custom icon you made and downloaded from the web. .svg file is recommended. And, it’s better to keep file location to avoid issue.

In my case, I changed the ‘snap’ folder icon to ‘folder-snap.svg‘. After making the change, the folder icon will look like the screenshot shows below.

Restore Folder Icon

To restore the change, simply re-do the previous steps. In last step, instead of choosing icon file, click “Revert” button in the file-chooser dialog will do the trick.

That’s it. Enjoy!

Hi, I'm Merilyn Ne, a computer geek working on Ubuntu Linux for many years and would like to write useful tips for beginners. Forgive me for language mistakes. I'm not a native speaker of English.