This very brief tutorial will guide you through the steps required to change the background color of the macOS Finder.
Changing the background color in Finder is something that after you do, you’ll wonder why it wasn’t made more obvious as a feature (it’s a bit buried, as you’ll see in this tutorial). NOTE: the color change will only affect the Icon view of Finder, the list, column and Cover Flow views do not have the option to change the background color.
- By default, the “Icon view” of Finder has a plain white background.
- With a little bit of searching, we can change that color. Make sure a Finder window is selected (with “Icon view” as the currently displayed view) and then select View -> Show View Options.
- In the Background: section of the window that will appear, select Color instead of the default White. Click the “color box” that appears after you select Color
- Now pick a color that you’d like to use.
- Close out of the ‘color-picker’ window, and check out your new Finder background color.
- If you’d like to set this as the default color for all Finder windows (again, when Icon view is selected) – click the Use as Defaults button.
- That’s it – you’re done! You can always come back to the View -> Sort View Options section and change back to the defaults, switch the color etc.
If this helped, check out some of our other macOS Finder tips and tricks!
