Colours, icons and tags
A folder in a template can carry Finder tags and a folder icon. Both are applied as the folder is created, so a deployed project comes out looking the way you would have made it look by hand, without you doing it each time. Neither is applied on Windows, for the reason below, but a template carries both wherever it goes.
Tags and icons belong to folders. Files in a template have neither.
Windows has no equivalent of either: File Explorer's tags are a property of certain file formats rather than something you can put on a folder, and a folder's picture is not yours to choose.
Neither is dropped. A template keeps its tags and its icons through everything Windows does to it - editing, export, import - so a template that has been to a PC still tags and colours its folders the next time somebody uses it on a Mac.
You can set tag names here, for a template meant for a Mac. Colours and icons you cannot, because choosing one would need the list of what that Mac already has.
Tagging a folder
Select a folder and use Add Tag in its inspector.
The list narrows as you type. A name Prefab has not seen offers a Create row instead.
The swatches under the Create row set the colour the new tag gets, or no colour at all. Finder adopts that colour the first time it sees the name.
Applied tags appear as chips under Tags. Clicking a tag in the list again takes it off.
Every chip carries a dot: filled with the tag's colour, or a hollow ring where it has none. Where the colour is Prefab's to set, that dot is a menu for changing it. Clear takes every tag off the folder at once.
Prefab writes tags the way Finder does, so a folder deployed with the Important tag really is
tagged Important: it appears under that tag in Finder's sidebar and can be untagged there like any
other folder.
Tag names can hold placeholders. Tag a folder {{client_name}} and it comes out tagged with the
client's name; the panel confirms this with "Variables in tag names are filled in on deploy" as soon
as it sees double braces in a tag name.
Shown on macOS. This screen has no Windows equivalent.
Who decides a tag's colour
A Finder tag is a name first and a colour second. Client Work is a tag, and so is Red. The seven
colours most people think of as "the colours" - Red, Orange, Yellow, Green, Blue, Purple and Gray -
are ordinary named tags that happen to be named after their colour.
Finder keeps one colour per tag name, and it ignores any other colour written for a name it already
knows. Tag a folder Review in red when Finder already holds Review as yellow and the folder shows
yellow, and Finder never corrects what Prefab wrote on the file.
For a tag Finder already knows, Prefab shows the colour rather than offering to change it - the chip's dot says Finder sets the colour for this tag. Colours are only Prefab's to pick for a name that is genuinely new. Recolour such a tag in Finder and Prefab catches up the next time it reads a folder carrying it, which means after a Refresh or a Scan Folder…, not straight away.
Recolouring one of the seven colour tags works the way it does in Finder: the tag is swapped for the
colour tag of the new colour. Turning Yellow blue gives you the Blue tag, not a blue tag still
called Yellow.
Finder lets you rename the colour tags, and Prefab cannot read the new names. Writing Orange on a
Mac where that tag is called Orange123 creates a second, unrelated tag. Right-click the colour tag
in the picker and choose Rename to Match Finder… to tell Prefab the name you use.
How Prefab learns your tag names
macOS gives an app no way to ask Finder for its tag list, so Prefab assembles one from everything it can actually read:
- The seven colour tags, under their standard names
Home,WorkandImportant, which macOS ships with and stores nowhere- Tags read off folders Prefab has access to, whether you granted access or deployed there
- Tags found on folders brought in by importing a folder
- Tags you create in Prefab
The picker's footer has the two controls for filling that list out. Refresh re-reads the folders Prefab can already see. Scan Folder… asks you to pick a folder and looks through it - three levels deep, up to 5,000 items - registering every tag name and colour it finds. A line underneath reports how many items were checked and how many tag names that added, so an empty result reads as "nothing found here" rather than as a bug.
One kind of tag can never be discovered: one that exists in Finder's list, is applied to nothing, and is not a favourite. Nothing on disk carries it, so there is nothing to read. Type the name once in the picker and Prefab remembers it from then on.
Remove from Prefab, in a tag's right-click menu in the picker, takes a tag out of Prefab's list. It does not touch Finder, and it does not untag anything already on disk.
Folder icons
The Icon section of a folder's inspector offers SF Symbols in eight categories - People, Animals & Nature, Food & Drink, Activity, Travel & Places, Objects, Symbols and Work. Click one to set it, or Clear to go back to a plain folder.
Shown on macOS. This screen has no Windows equivalent.
How the icon reaches disk depends on the version of macOS:
- macOS 26 and later set the symbol through the system's own folder-icon mechanism, the same one Finder's icon picker uses. The result is a real system folder icon that follows the appearance of the Mac it is on.
- Earlier versions have no such mechanism, so Prefab draws the symbol onto the folder's normal icon and sets the result as a custom icon. It looks close, but it is a picture rather than a live icon.
Icons survive an import as well: importing a folder with Preserve folder icons switched on reads the symbol off each folder and keeps it on the template.