Tired of the linen background image of folders in Launchpad? You can easily change it to anything you want with this simple walkthrough. If you recall our post on changing the Dashboard wallpaper, you’ll find this trick is very similar. Obviously this is OS X Lion only.

First off, you have to use a PNG file, so find one that you want as the new Launchpad folder background image. For the sake of this tutorial I’m going to use the t-shirt background pattern from iCloud beta which I converted to a PNG file myself with Preview (File > Export > PNG). Name your exported PNG file “ecsb_background_tile.png” and then…

From the Mac OS X desktop, hit Command+Shift+G to enter “Go To Folder” and enter the following location:

/System/Library/CoreServices/Dock.app/Contents/Resources/ Find the file named ecsb_background_tile.png and rename it to ecsb_background_tile-backup.png or drag it to your desktop – this is important because it allows you to revert your changes and get back to the linen default

Now drag your own exported PNG image “ecsb_background_tile.png” into the Dock.app Resources directory, you will be asked to authenticate the change because this is a system file

Next you relaunch the Dock by killing it, so open Terminal and type the following:

killall Dock Open Launchpad and a folder, and enjoy your new background image

Another example of how this could look shows an aluminum background image:





If you want to change the little folder thumbnail background like this screenshot shows, the file you’ll want to modify is:

/System/Library/CoreServices/Dock.app/Contents/Resources/ecsb_group.png

You’ll want to use an image editor to modify that image appropriately though.

Thanks to @DigiGarbage for the tip and the second screenshot from Tumblr.