• The Easy Way - Double-click whichever icon you'd like to apply to something; then, in the dialog boxes that appear, select a file, folder, or disk to apply the icon to. Each of our sets includes an AppleScript applet called iconSetter which makes this possible; however, iconSetter only works under Mac OS 9.0 and newer.
• The IconDropper Way - If you use the Iconfactory's IconDropper product, you can download our icons as icon packs, and follow IconDropper's instructions for applying the icons.
• The Long Way - You can use the Finder's Info window to copy and paste icons:
  1. Select the icon you want to use.
  2. Choose Get Info (General Information) from the File menu.
  3. Click on the icon in the upper-left corner of the info window.
  4. Choose Copy from the Edit menu.
  5. Find and select the file/folder/disk you want to put the icon onto.
  6. Choose Get Info (General Information) from the File menu.
  7. Click on the icon in the upper-left corner of the info window.
  8. Choose Paste from the Edit menu.
  This method works under all versions of the Mac OS.

Note that this only applies to the original Mac OS X Server (aka Rhapsody, son of NeXTSTEP/OPENSTEP); not Mac OS X Server 10.x which has an Aqua interface.

Normal files in Mac OS X Server can't have custom icons; they can onyl have the icon defined for their file type.

If you put a file called .dir.tiff in a folder (or at the top level of a volume), that TIFF file will become the folder's icon. All our Mac OS X Server icons are distributed in this format, so if you want to use an icons.cx icon on another folder, just copy the .dir.tiff file into the other folder. (Note: you can't see files whose names start with a period in the Workspace Manager unless you enable Expert Mode in the Expert control panel.) If you also include a file named .opendir.tiff, that icon will appear when you're dragging something onto the folder/disk.

To change the icon of an application or the icon an application defines for a file type, replace the TIFF icon file in the application's .app wrapper with another TIFF icon of your choice. If you go hunting through the depths of your /System directory, you'll also find the TIFF files for default folder and disk icons and other system icons, which can also be replaced by replacing said TIFF files.

Mac OS 8.5 and later use a new format for custom icons, allowing icons with millions of colors, 256 levels of transparency, and larger sizes that can be seen under Mac OS X. Here at icons.cx, we design our icons to take full advantage of the new format. Designing for (or even translating to) the older format sacrifices a lot of quality, so we don't do it. If you want really cool-looking icons, upgrade your Mac OS or get a new Mac. :-)

Looks like one of the icons at right, doesn't it?

Short answer: There's a bug in Mac OS 8.5 and 8.6. Upgrade to Mac OS 9 and it'll be fixed.

Technical answer: When Mac OS 8.5 or 8.6 tries to draw the Application Menu, it looks for each app's Finder icon in the old icon format. When you paste one of our icons onto an app, it tells the finder that the app has a custom icon, and it should look for an icon of ID -16455 when it wants to display it. However, when Mac OS looks for an old-format icon of ID -16455, it doesn't find one in the application and looks in the System resource space instead. Usually, it finds the custom icon of a font.

You could also solve this problem by making sure that the app you paste one of our icons onto has an old-format icon of ID -16455 in it. How to go about doing that is left as an exercise for the reader.

They look like the icons on the right, don't they?

Quick answer: If you downloaded a Mac OS X set from this page and there's a "Classic Mac OS" version of the same set available from this page or this page, download and use it instead. Or upgrade to Mac OS 9.1 or later.

Technical answer: All our featured icon sets are optimized for Mac OS X and Millions of colors, which means they're missing the elements they need in order to display correctly in older operating systems at lower bit depths so as to save on file size. Our "Classic" icons include everything they need in order to display at Thousands of colors or below on Mac OS 9.0.4 or older.

Mac OS X and Mac OS 8.5 through 9.2 do indeed share the same icon format. However, we keep them separate for two reasons:

First, the Mac OS X 128x128 icon elements are large — they make icon sets take longer to download. Also, Mac OS X doesn't use some of the legacy icon elements which Mac OS 8 and 9 need in order to properly display an icon. So, our Mac OS X sets and Mac OS 8/9 sets are separate so that your download size is kept small.

Second, the "look and feel" of Mac OS X's Aqua interface is very different from that of the "Classic" Mac OS. Many of our icons are intended to fit in well with their OS environment, so some of the icons are artistically different between their Mac OS X and Mac OS 8/9 versions.

And of course, some of our formats actually are different; Mac OS X Server 1.x icons are a completely different format from that used in Mac OS 8.x, 9.x and 10.x. And IconDropper and iControl are quite useful if you like to organize large collections of icons without eating up disk space or replace the system icon sets on Mac OS 8 or 9.