Then if I press Command-N again, I’ll get a new file in Preview with just my selected size.įinally, keep in mind that if you’re looking for a third-party System Preferences icon (like Adobe Flash), those don’t appear in the same place as Apple’s default ones. That’ll pop all of the sizes of those big beautiful icons into a new document, where you can manipulate or export them in many different ways.Īs I mentioned before, my favorite thing to do is to select the size I want to use from the thumbnails in the sidebar and press Command-C. Then launch the Preview application and press Command-N ( File> New from Clipboard).
So for example, to grab the Time Machine icon you’ll select that item from the Finder window first.Īfterward, press Command-C ( Edit> Copy) to copy its icons to the clipboard. When you press “Go” and collect $200…I mean, when you arrive at that folder, you’ll see all of the familiar icons from System Preferences, and you can follow similar steps to open and use those as I discussed in the previous article. Then copy and paste the following path in the box that’ll appear: /System/Library/PreferencePanes Open Finder first and choose Go> Go to Folder from the menus at the top of the screen (or press Shift-Command-G). But what if you want one of the icons from within System Preferences? I mean, you could take a screenshot if you really had to, but that ain’t the prettiest way to go, especially if you need a larger size.
I’ve written a tip before about how to grab high-quality application icons from your Mac if you need, say, the iPhoto icon for an article, sending instructions to others, or what have you.