The application that colors your icons according to their tag.
Finder gives your tagged files a small colored dot. Hue Dada² ! gives them a colored icon.
Point it at the folders you care about, and every file you tag is restamped with its own icon — the real Finder preview, tinted to the color of its tag. Your Downloads, your projects, your photos: you see the color of a file the moment you open the window, at any icon size, from across the room. Nothing to click, nothing to run. Hue Dada² ! lives in the menu bar and keeps your icons in sync, quietly, in the background.
TEN YEARS ON THE MAC APP STORE
Hue Dada has been coloring icons since 2015, and this is its biggest release yet: rebuilt from the ground up for modern macOS — faster, sharper, and with a brand-new look.
WHAT IT DOES
• Colors the file’s actual preview — the document, the photo, the PDF page you would see anyway, tinted to its tag color. Not a generic swatch.
• Watches the folders you choose, and only those. Tag a file in the Finder and its icon follows, even when no window is open.
• Colors apps, folders and aliases too — an alias takes the icon of the item it points to, so you can color something you cannot even tag directly.
• Untag a file and its icon goes right back to normal. Nothing is left behind.
• Subtle by default, with a saturated color overlay if you like your colors loud.
• Drag folders straight from the Finder onto the list to start watching them.
• Opens at login, and can hide its menu bar icon when no window is open — for those of us with a crowded menu bar.
ANY COLOR
Finder gives you seven colors. Hue Dada² ! gives you all of them.
With the optional Any Color unlock, map any Finder tag to any color you like — from the standard palette, from the Crayons box, or from anywhere in the color picker. Give “Invoices” a deep Cayenne, “Ideas” a Honeydew green, “Archive” a quiet Mocha. Even the colorless tags Finder never colored at all finally have a color of their own — and your files carry it.
A one-time purchase. No subscription. Everything else stays free.
BUILT ON SPOTLIGHT
Hue Dada² ! follows your tags through Spotlight, the index macOS already keeps: nothing is polled, nothing spins in the background, and a new tag is picked up within seconds — even one you set while the app was closed. It inherits Spotlight's limits too: folders on network volumes aren't indexed, and files stored inside a package — a Photos, Music or TV library, or an app — are invisible to it, so they can't be colored. The library or the app itself can. iCloud Drive is skipped too: it syncs tags with long, unpredictable delays, so keep watched folders on your Mac.
PRIVATE BY DESIGN
Hue Dada² ! is sandboxed and works entirely on your Mac. It only ever touches the folders you explicitly hand it, it collects nothing, and it sends nothing anywhere.
Requires macOS 14 or later.
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Great, with one request
sugrmagz
Love that I can finally set folder colors to what they should be -- same color as the label! This is way too complicated by default (when you "adjust colors" on the folder icon in Preview, it takes much fiddling to find colors, vs of having a color picker) AND High Sierra doesn't seem to work as other versions. This little app solves the whole problem. My only complaint is that the folder colors are too muted. Red is almost orange, Yellow is almost umber, Green is muddy, and Blue is too light. I would really like to pick my own folder color with a picker, not rely on the app to decide what version of red is red, etc. One more plus: contrary to what some have said, there IS a way to do multiple folders at once! Just select them all, ctrl+click, choose the label you want, and then while they are all selected, drag them all to the icon. Wait a few seconds, and they will all change color. Yay!
Developer Response
Thanks for this feedback! YOU CAN do exactly what you are asking for. In order to use ‘stronger’ colors, you can add a tag whose name matches one of the ‘Crayons’ colors (from the color picker). For example, on an English system, adding a tag named ‘Maraschino’ will color the item in a red red ;-) when adding it to the tracked items, by dropping it onto the Hue Dada ! menu. In order to make this even easier, you can drag and drop the tag names out of the Preferences window (when in the ‘Colors’ pane). You can also use any value from the color wheel, by first clicking the ‘bigger’ tag, near this draggable tag name… or, if you are an HTML expert, use the #XXX or #XXXXXX color names as tag, directly.
Great idea, not so great execution
AlexDesignsIt
I wish there was more documentation on how to use this, because it is NOT intuitive at all.How can I change the names of the tags? It says to drag and drop a tag to associate a color with it, but no matter what I do it doesn't work. Help please?
Cumbersome: needs tighter Finder integration
Bend person
Hue Dada partially restores very useful Finder label capabilities that Apple removed many years ago, but the implementation is awkward. Instead of needing to manually drag each item to the app’s Menu Bar icon, there should at least be the option of automatically coloring icons according to the first (or a preferred) Finder tag.We’re working on computers whose job is to automate tasks. Hue Dada is a good start toward a manual workaround for Finder shortcomings, and hopefully the author will enable automation soon. And yes, I realize that Apple’s locked down a lot of Finder functionality, but a creative developer should be able to work something out.
Makes finder so much easier to navigate
bkrong
It’s amazing what a little color will do for navigating folder structures. Love this app!
A maintenance update.
• On macOS Sonoma and Sequoia, Hue Dada² ! shows its classic icon again, following the Light and Dark appearance.
• The welcome window now reopens where you left it.
• Small wording fixes in the help book.
Keep the feedback coming — every message is read.
Version 2.0.1
The developer, DouWère, s.p.r.l., indicated that the app’s privacy practices may include handling of data as described below. For more information, see the developer’s privacy policy .
Data Not Collected
The developer does not collect any data from this app.
Privacy practices may vary, for example, based on the features you use or your age. Learn More
Accessibility
The developer has not yet indicated which accessibility features this app supports. Learn More
