Software Utilities you can't live without – in living colour!

Colour Coding and Adding Images to Folders

Are you a very organized person? Do you like to colour-code all of your folders at work or at home by importance or colour order? If you find it easier to work with folders or files if you visually organize your paper work, did you know that you can do the same thing on your computer?

Imagine being able to change the icon color for folders so that your financial folder can be green (like money), the embroidery design folder could be blue, the downloads folder could be yellow – I am sure you are getting the picture now. Well there is a really nice little freeware program called Folder Marker that you can use to quickly and easily change the color of any folder on your computer.

Not only can you change the colour of the folder, but you can also this utility to change the folder icon to represent the state of that folder, for example if you have a folder with private data, you can change the icon to have a small lock appear.

Once you have installed Folder Marker onto your computer, you can simply launch the application, choose the folder you want to mark, and then pick the icon you want to replace for that folder. Choose from the Colors tab, the Main tab and User’s Icons. The Main tab basically has a set of icons corresponding to a certain state, such as high priority, private or important files, etc.

If you already have icons that you like or that you have created yourself, you can actually click on User’s icon and add them to Folder Marker. You can then mark folders with those customize icons.

A second way you can mark folders with these special icons is by simply right-clicking on them and navigating to the Mark Folder menu!

You can also use Folder Marker to change the folder icons for a group of folders at the same time! Just select multiple folders and right-click to get the Mark Folder option.

Creating Icons from Images

ImagIcon is a small program, but it does its job very well. You can take an image and save it as an icon in all of the different sizes: 16×16, 32×32, 48×48, and 64×64. If you have a web site, a bonus is the fact that 16×16 size can be used to give your web site a logo in the address bar.  This program is not freeware, but you can download a demo to try it.

The program also lets your transform.images. You can scale the image to make it smaller or flip it horizontally or vertically. You can even save the icon with alpha transparency! If you don’t care to save the image as an icon, you can convert between any of the three formats: PNG, JPG, or BMP.

You can change the settings by click on the Options menu item.

• Icon Settings allows you to pick the size of your final icon.
• Image Transform lets you pick the transformations you want if you are converting between picture formats (JPG to PNG). (you can convert to the same format and simply transform the picture also. So if you have a bunch of JPEG images and you simply want to scale them quickly, then in Save Mode choose JPEG and choose the settings for image transform).
• Save Mode is the format that you want to convert to.
• Save Directory is if you want to have the pictures stored somewhere else other than the directory where the originals are located.

Note:  I am not affiliated with any of these programs nor do I personally recommend them or guarantee results.