How to Change the Icon of a Shared Network Folder

Did you know you can make cooperative work in your company easier by assigning custom icons to shared network folders using FolderIco?

Here is a good idea: when many co-workers access the same folders, mark these folders with some glyphs to indicate the status of the corresponding projects: approved, pending, in progress, finished and so on. This way every collaborator will instantly know what's currently going on. Should we say this makes the entire team much more efficient?

Now, changing the icon of a shared folder using FolderIco is easy:

Assign the icon

Right-click the folder and apply one of the available icons, or assign an icon from the library using the main window of the program.

Alternatively, you can create your own icon and assign it to the network folder to precisely depict the contents of the folder or the status of the shared project.

Requirements to set custom icon to the network folder:

  • Your user account must have permissions to write to this folder.
  • Distributable flag must be set. This will put the custom icon inside the network folder, so any user could see it.

Make sure other members of the team can see the icon

Under Windows, the shared network folder must meet the following conditions:

  • The folder must be marked as Read-Only. This will not make the folder contents read-only as you might mistakenly guess from the name. Instead, the folder Read-Only attribute simply tells Windows Explorer that the folder's view is customized.
  • The network must be configured so that folder's attributes (including the Read-Only attribute) were accessible via the network.

Make Samba store folder attributes (Unix only)

On a Samba share (Unix implementation of SMB/network share protocol) you will also need these additional steps, because by default Samba do not store folder attributes.

  1. First make sure Samba stores DOS-style permissions (like "read only"), by adding this line on your share definition (/etc/samba/smb.conf):
    store dos attributes = yes
  2. Restart Samba (sudo service samba restart)