The icons on my mom’s Mac are tiny. Is there some way to make the icons and associated text bigger so she can work with the system more easily?
The classic way to make everything on a computer screen larger is to lower the resolution: the smaller the computer thinks the screen is, the larger everything ends up being to compensate. You can experiment with that by going to the Display System Preference, but there’s a much smarter way to fix things! After all, change the resolution and every program suffers, even the games, streaming video content, and Web browser, so I always see that as an option of last resort.
So instead of artificially lowering the resolution of your Mom’s Mac screen, the better solution is to tweak the Finder settings for the Desktop. That’s pretty easy to do, but let’s look at all the different options and how they can affect what’s shown on-screen.
To start, exactly as it was displayed on my own Mac OS X El Capitan system, here are some folder and file icons:
If you hold down the Control key and click on the desktop, you’ll get the Desktop context menu:
As you can see, choose “Show View Options” from the menu.
And you’ll get a nifty little window with all the options you need to tweak and explore:
You might find your Mom’s computer has a default icon size of 44 x 44 or 48 x 48, but you can change it! Notice also the Grid spacing, which controls how tightly the icons fit together.
So let’s make the icons bigger. A lot bigger. Here’s the result:
Notice how everything’s jammed together, however. To fix that simply adjust Grid spacing too:
What happens if you make the icons super, super tiny? Then the available space for text reduces too, as you’d expect:
Very space efficient, but not very easy to work with!
Now let’s make the icons big again, but this time let’s also make the text larger by choosing 12pt instead of 10pt in the window.
You’ll notice that everything’s easier to read (as makes sense!)
Really want to make everything more informative? Click and choose “Show item info” in the settings window too.
Lots of useful information shows up:
Pretty cool, eh? I like having the item info sometimes, particularly with images, where you can see their dimensions without having to open up any programs to do so, and with hard drives, where total size and available space are both displayed too.
Oh, and one last setting. If you turn off the “Show icon preview” option, then the mini-thumbnails of photos, documents, etc, are all replaced by generic system icons:
So there you have it. Lots of different ways you can fine tune your Mom’s experience on her Mac system so that it’s easier to read, easier to see the names and titles of documents, even ways to enable – or disable – thumbnail previews so she can see what’s what with just a glance.