How to resize desktop icons on macOS
Macs have great screens and whenever the lineup is refreshed, you can always expect an improvement in the screen’s quality. By improvement we mean a higher resolution display. HD displays are great but the icons tend to be smaller across the board on higher resolution displays. If you want to resize desktop icons on macOS, whether to make them bigger or smaller, you can. Here’s how.
Resize desktop icons on macOS
Desktop icon size is measured in pixels on macOS. That information is relevant only so far as to tell you whether an icon is now bigger or smaller than it previously was. Go to the desktop and on the menu bar, select the View. From the menu that opens, select ‘Show view options’.
A window will open with a slider for changing the icon size. The current size will be given in pixels e.g., 64×64. If you want smaller icons, drag the slider to the left and the icon size will decrease. If you want larger icons, drag the slider to the right. The change in size will be reflected as you make it.
As you resize icons, the text size for the labels will change accordingly however, you can change it from the Text Size to anything else.
With bigger, or smaller icons, you will notice that the current grid spacing doesn’t look right. Grid spacing is basically the space between two icons. If you’ve increased the size of icons without changing the grid size, there won’t be a lot of space between them and it might be hard to select icons or read their labels.
For larger icons, it’s a good idea to increase the space between icons. For smaller icons, it’s a good idea to decrease the icon space so that more icons can fit in a single column. There’s no rule forcing you to change the grid spacing so you can choose anything that suits you.
There is an upper and lower limit to how big or small the icons can be but you’ll find that macOS is very generous with those limits and you won’t need to go beyond them. As for the icons, they will still look good. You don’t have to worry about an icon looking blurred out if it’s too big, or it being difficult to identify if it’s too small. An icon file is never just one size. It contains several different sizes of the icon which are used to show smaller or larger versions of it.
Need to change desktop icon size on Windows 10? It’s even easier.
Thanks! That helped a lot.