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[SOLVED] Changing icons for filetype

zaster379

Wed Aug 20, 2014 4:12:58 pm

I found out online how to change a file's icon but that only worked for the one, particular file. I would like to change the icon for all mp3 files that list in the file manager. It's an easy thing to do in Windows but I haven't found anything on how to do it searching through the forum.

zaster379

Thu Aug 21, 2014 2:04:54 pm

Ok, I found out how to do it for mp3 so I have marked this solved. It was mainly by luck. I noticed that under Properties, for an mp3 file, it had the file type listed as audio-mpeg. I also read online that most linux icon files have the png or svg file types. I did a search through the folders and sub-folders of the home folder, looking for audio-mpeg and then viewing any that had a svg or png file extension.

There were only two folders that had the (same) file audio-mpeg.png. Viewing them, they matched the icons that were being displayed for mp3s in the file manager. There was another file that was called audio-mp3.png but the file manager doesn't seem to use that one for mp3s so I left it alone.

/usr/share/icons/ZorinLight/scalable/mimetypes
and in
/usr/share/icons/ZorinDark/scalable/mimetypes

Next was to replace them with the icons I wanted. I didn't know if I had ZorinLight or ZorinDark so I just replace them both. I backed up the original files first, by copying them to my Download folder, where I could put them back if it didn't work. You need root access to move the files around. Use the terminal and the command sudo -i, followed by nautilus, to bring up a file manager with root access.

After copying the two files, I then wanted to replace them with my own icons. I had no idea what makes an icon scalable. All I ended up doing was looking for icons that had the png extension and had roughly the same size as the original (128x128 pixels). I downloaded one I wanted from a free icon site that met that criteria. I then renamed the file audio-mpeg.png and moved them to the two folders (above) overwriting the original files. The change didn't show up at first. After I logged out and logged back in, they did though and I had what I wanted. (There may be some terminal command to get around having to log out and back in again but I didn't know one.)