Freeware program StyleFolder can perform a handful of interesting folder customizations straight from the Windows right-click context menu, including changing the folder’s icon, using an image as folder background, and changing the font color used inside the folder.
All customizations are saved into the folder itself and are preserved across PCs or over the network.
I’ve previously written about a couple of programs that change folder icons from the context menu on this site (Foldermarker, and FolderICO).
What I especially liked about the latter (and what I like about Stylefolder) is that the folder icon changes are saved into the folder itself, making it possible to, say, put a folder on the network or on a USB drive and preserve the custom folder look when you access the folder from another computer.
Here are some more notes on this program:
- Changing folder icon: can open any file to get icon resources (icon libraries, icon files, executables, etc.) It doesn’t offer pre-packaged icon sets like the programs mentioned above. If you are looking for free icons, however, check out this post.
- Changing folder background: you can, it seems, use any image file as background to your folder. The image will be tiled in the background so ’pattern’ type images will work best.
- Changing font color: this would be the font color for the files/folders displayed inside your folder.
- Reverting changes: can be done with a single click. Its also possible to revert any single changed element (icon/background/text color).
- Context menu integration: can be turned on or off.
- Folder size: because the image/icon you use is saved within the folder itself, you will have empty folders that, once customized, will actually be a few kilobytes in size (corresponding to your image file and/or icons sizes).
Wish list (or how this program could be even better):
- Once you implement changes to a folder, all of your icons on your desktop get alphabetically re-arranged for some reason. It would be good if the program didn’t need to do that (but as it is I simply use a program like Shock Desktop to get all the icons back to where they should be).
The verdict: a nice little program, if for the context-menu icon changing ability alone. If customizing Windows’ look-and-feel is your thing you’ll probably love this one.
Version Tested: 1.0.1
Compatibility: Windows 9X/ME/2000/NT/XP/Vista
Go to the program home page to download the latest version (approx 1.36 megs). If unavailabe you can download version 1.0.1 here (note: a more recent version is to be had in the previous link.
