Why doesn't Microsoft allow the user to customize folder icons?

I am unaware of the ability to choose a different icon than the standard manila folder. I don’t remember ever being able to change it. That would be a useful feature.

You can customize folder Icon, atleast in Windows 10

@Koxufoxu Can you provide instructions in how to do so?

right click on set folder, next you choose “properties” option (I think thats how its called), then
customization and the last option in that category is for folder icon

@Koxufoxu That is very helpful. Thank you!

Aren’t all folders still yellow colored? It would be nice to have adjustable folder color.

You create a shortcut to the folder and change the icon to the shortcut. Easy

@RocketGuy No, you can use any icon for a folder, or file. You can even download new icon images to use, or draw your own, if you want to.

@Zaku, how do you get them onto the folder? Where do you store them for access by the customizing utility?

I found the section that @Koxufoxu pointed to, with all sorts of little images; but all I really want is a color wheel or a color selection panel like you get for fonts, so I can make some particular folder yellow or green or pink.

Yep, that’s what I want too. I think Macs can do it.

Henry Ford said, “A consumer can have a Model T in any color they want, as long as it’s black.”

@Jeruba Icons can be in any location on your computer’s hard drives, just like any other file. You can’t easily add to the first list shown, because those are stored inside a system DLL file. But there is a Browse button on the icon selector (when you do right-click/Properties/Customize/Change_Icon), which will let you navigate to wherever you have other icon files on your computer.

(As an aside, many programs have icons embedded in their EXE files, so if you’d like to use an icon that some program uses, you can select the EXE to use its icon for other files.)

I did not think there was a feature for having a folder/icon appear in another color in Windows. And there isn’t . . . officially (apart from using new colored folder icons, which can be pretty easily found on web sites or created).

But there actually are some (third party – not made by Microsoft) programs that can do that. Here is an article about several of them. (NOTE that that article also has some ads on it that may also say DOWNLOAD, but are to download something else.)

Oh, and if you do download some icon images, but you don’t get them in .ico format, you can convert them at a site such as https://convertio.co/png-ico/ .

IconArchive offers icons that can be downloaded directly in ICO format, too.