Grab OS X's pretty pictures for use wherever you want

10 October 2015, 09:00

OS X is packed with wonderful artwork in the form of icons, illustrations, and much more. Mindful of this cornucopia, Rich Trouton has created a way to automatically grab them from their hidey-holes so you can take a leisurely look through.

  1. Visit the page for Rich’s script, and copy all of the text you see to the clipboard in the usual way.
  2. Open the Terminal app – it’s in the Utilities folder of the Applications list in Finder – and then type the following commands, hitting Enter after each: 
    pbpaste > artwork_copy.sh
chmod +x artwork_copy.sh
./artwork_copy.sh
  3. The script will take a few moments to complete. When it does you’ll see something like this: 
    All finished! Copied images and icon files are available in /tmp/icons.uHKj
    Type open, then paste in the path provided. In other words, you’ll end up with something like this: 
    open /tmp/icons.uHKj
  4. Finder will show the results and you can take a leisurely look through at the images, which are split into three folders depending on their file type: PNG, PDF and ICNS (icon).

Because the images have been placed in the /tmp directory, they’ll be wiped at some stage as part of the system maintenance so make sure to copy out the images you’re interested in sooner rather than later. Alternatively, you could just run the steps again at some point in the future!

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