Is there a way to install custom folder icons?

Question

I have several folders in my home folder that are just plain blue icons, which I feel are a little out of place.

Is there an icon theme or tweak I can use to improve the look of my home folder a glance?

Answer 1

There is one trick, but is only relevant if you are using a small number of folders in the user's home directory. By default, in the home directory there is Documents, Downloads, Music, Pictures, Public, Templates and Videos. It's a set of default user directories, see the freedesktop.org website for further information.

The idea is that you can replace your unwanted folders on the other, and give them the other icons. This is not exactly the right way, but it works.

I'll tell about it in my example:

I do not use Public and Templates, but I have folders GitHub and Sports Interactive and I would give them custom icons. To do this, I first edited the names of folders in ~/.config/user-dirs.dirs. It now looks like this:

XDG_DOWNLOAD_DIR="$HOME/Downloads"
XDG_TEMPLATES_DIR="$HOME/Sports Interactive"
XDG_PUBLICSHARE_DIR="$HOME/GitHub"
XDG_DOCUMENTS_DIR="$HOME/Documents"
XDG_MUSIC_DIR="$HOME/Music"
XDG_PICTURES_DIR="$HOME/Pictures"
XDG_VIDEOS_DIR="$HOME/Videos"

After I posted custom icons in .icons/elementary/places (if you use a non-standard icon theme, the path will be different). The structure of the files in my case looks like this:

I took the icons from FabianInostroza's DeviantArt. This is the largest repository of folder icons in the elementary OS style that I know of.

After I logged out and in again, my home folder looks like this:

Answer 2

This is not possible at the moment. I reported this on launchpad at Possibility to change folder icons.

You can add a bounty on this if you want to have this feature as soon as possible.