Have you ever needed, or just wanted, to make a shortcut icon on the the desktop in Mac OS X? Honestly it’s relatively trivial to do but the result isn’t always what people expect. My goal is to demonstrate how to create a web page shortcut that is easily identifiable. This is something handy for teachers who want to make it easier for their students to access specific websites, or a business that wants to publish an icon for their customer login page.
Step 1. Launched Safari and navigate to the page you would like to bookmark on the desktop. In figure 1 I have opened Olivent.com.
Step 2. Drag the URL, usually by grabbing the FavIcon, to the desktop. Refer to figure 2 for details.
Step 3. You’ll notice a new @ HTTP icon on your desktop similar to Figure 3 with the title of the link you dragged. More than likely you would like to change this to something a little more meaningful, since all of the shortcuts to web links you create will have this same icon.
Step 4. To change the icon to something a bit more meaningful open the info page for the item by either selecting the item and hitting COMMAND-I or right click (hold the control key while clicking) on the item to display the context menu as demonstrated in Figure 4.
Step 5. Once the info page is open return to the web page you created the shortcut for and select something that makes it easily identified and screen capture is with COMMAND-CONTROL-SHIFT-4 (don’t worry it does take 2 hands). You’ll be able to select a portion of the page in Figure 5 I have selected only the company logo.
Step 6. This image will be copied into the system buffer and you need to return to the item’s info page and click on the mini icon in the upper left corner which will highlight in blue. Simply hit COMMAND-v to paste the image from step 5. Figures 6 and 7 display the before and after effect of this operation.
Before:
After:
Step 7. Finally examine the icon on the desktop. It should look something like Figure 8, which you can now drag to your dock bar.
Regardless of your reasons for creating a web page shortcut I am certain that after reading this you agree that it is extremely easy to do in Mac OS X. I hope that you have enjoyed this tutorial and will leave a kind comment as well as support our sponsors. Remember clicking on an add helps us keep the lights on so that we can bring you more of this high quality programming.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Mikel King (http://twitter.com/mikelking) has been a leader in the Information Technology Services field for over 20 years. He is currently the CEO of Olivent Technologies, a professional creative services partnership in NY. Additionally he is currently serving as the Secretary of the BSD Certification group as well as a Senior Editor for BSD News.
Good job, nothing like the Windows process though. Not bad or good on that count. Thought the ability to copy a logo was very good. Never had this ability in Windows that I know of.
The only problem with the logo was after I copied and pasted it was not clearly visible. I had to modify it to a subsection of the original image for clarity.
Many thanks for the help.
THANKS YOU A MILLION TIMES OVER! I have switched to Mac from PC
over a year ago and this bugged me for so long that mac doesn’t
just create the icon when I save a link to desktop. First time I
saw something explained so easy!
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Great tutorial. Thanks very much
great step by step really useful will follow for more of the same
Thanks for this – very handy hint!
Glad you found it helpful.
I have done everything you said and I can not get this image to
change. I am the admin and I even took the locks off anyway just
like you said, closed the “get info” window and reopened it. I
tried everything again (with locks off) and still the image will
not change. I’m wondering if it’s the site? I’m just trying to make
Netflix easier for my kids to find when they get on the computer.
Maybe it’s Netflix??
What version of Mac OS X are you running?
This helps me a lot. Thanks!
Fantastic! I am glad it helped you…
Thank you for the comment…
I’m having trouble with getting this to work. I have Safari 5.0.5. When I paste over the generic icon, the size of the file increases (upper right hand corner) but the generic icon does not change. Been searching around online and it looks like there are others who have had a similar problem. Right now I’m stuck with a generic ico icon.
Hi Bill!
Thanks for the comment it great to hear from you. I am running Safari 5.0.5 on my system too. I just quickly made a new link shortcut on my desktop without much effort so let’s check a couple of things.
Are you and admin on the computer?
Select the icon and let’s examine the permissions
Do you have write permission on this link?
If you do not then adjust the m so you have both read & write
Make sure the permissions have taken effect I usually close the info dialog down and reopen it
If you have full write permission than it should be a matter of pasting the new image over the small image next to the icon title not the preview image
If this doesn’t help would you be open to an iChat screen sharing session (ping me on Twitter.)? I would love to riddle out why it’s not working.
Cheers,
Mikel
Thanks so much!!! It worked perfectly!!!
I am glad that this helped you. Thank you so much for dropping the note.
Amazing !! Almost all this kind of tutorials is for Windows. You are great. Thanks !!
Thank you for taking the time to post a comment, especially such a nice one. I hope that we can continue to provide useful articles.
cheers,
m!