Hue Dada² ! Help
Choose a topic on the left to get started.
© 2015-2026, Frédéric Blondiau — DouWère, s.r.l.
Choose a topic on the left to get started.
© 2015-2026, Frédéric Blondiau — DouWère, s.r.l.
In the Finder, a tagged file gets a small colored dot next to its name. Discreet — often too discreet.
Hue Dada² ! gives it a colored icon instead: the file’s own preview, tinted to the color of its tag.
The same folder, before and after. Nothing was renamed, nothing was moved: only the icons changed.
You hand Hue Dada² ! the folders that matter to you — your Downloads, your Desktop, a project folder. It watches those, and only those.
Whenever you tag a file in the Finder, Hue Dada² ! takes the preview macOS already has of it — the photo, the document, the page of the PDF — colors it with the tag color, and stamps it back onto the file as its icon.
Remove the tag, and the original icon quietly comes back.
Hue Dada² ! has no Dock icon and no window to keep open. It lives in the menu bar and keeps your icons in sync in the background.
Everything it needs, macOS already knows: it follows your tags through Spotlight, so nothing is scanned in a loop and nothing spins on your Mac.
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Ten years after its first release, Hue Dada has been rebuilt from the ground up for modern macOS — new engine, new look, new name.
Hue Dada² ! requires macOS 14 (Sonoma) or later.
On macOS 26 (Tahoe), the Finder colors labeled folders by itself. Hue Dada² ! leaves them to the system there, and takes care of your files.
Hue Dada² ! never goes wandering around your disk. It only ever sees the folders you hand it — and it asks macOS for nothing else.
Open the settings from the menu bar (or press ⌘,), go to the General tab, and click Add Folder…
You can also drag a folder from the Finder straight onto the list. Hold the drag over the window for a moment and it comes to the front, so you can drop even when it was hidden behind the Finder.
Sub-folders come along: watching a folder covers everything inside it. Watching a folder and its parent at the same time is therefore redundant — Hue Dada² ! points that out.
The Status panel tells you how many folders are watched, how many icons Hue Dada² ! currently maintains, and what it is doing right now. The small spinner turns while icons are being written.
A ⚠️ badge on a row means the folder deserves your attention:
Click the badge to read the explanation.
👉 Watch the folders where you actually tag things, rather than your whole home folder. Fewer folders means fewer icons to maintain — and colors that mean something.
Hue Dada² ! adds nothing to your habits: you tag in the Finder, exactly as you always have.
Right-click a file and pick one of the seven colors, use the Tags button in the Finder toolbar, or open Get Info (⌘I) and type a tag name.
A second or two later — the time for Spotlight to notice — the icon is colored.
Change the tag and the icon follows. Remove the tag and the original icon comes back, untouched.
Hue Dada² ! only colors icons while it runs. But it remembers what it has stamped, so everything you tagged or untagged in the meantime is caught up the next time it starts.
👉 Turn on Open at Login (settings, Advanced tab) and you can forget it exists.
A Finder tag does not have to be one of the seven colors: Home, Work, Important — and every tag you invent — have no color at all. Hue Dada² ! leaves those alone, unless you unlock Any Color, which lets you give each of them a color of your own.
Almost everything you can tag — and each in the way that makes it recognizable.
Anything the Finder can preview keeps its preview: it is tinted to the tag color and set on its white page, just as the Finder frames a thumbnail. A file macOS cannot preview keeps its generic icon, tinted.
An app keeps its own, designed icon — colored. Not a blank placeholder.
On macOS 14 and 15, a tagged folder gets a colored icon — and a special folder (Documents, Downloads, or one you gave a custom icon) keeps its embossed glyph.
On macOS 26 (Tahoe), the Finder colors labeled folders by itself, and it does it well — so Hue Dada² ! stays out of the way and leaves them to the system.
An alias is colored after the item it points to, arrow badge included.
👉 A trick worth knowing: you cannot tag an application on the system volume, but you can make an alias of it in a watched folder — and tag that.
A Photos, Music or TV library, an application, an RTFD document: macOS treats these as a single, sealed item. Hue Dada² ! colors the item itself, but the files inside it stay untouched — Spotlight does not index them, so nobody can see their tags.
If you gave an item an icon of your own — one pasted into the Get Info window, or, on macOS 26, a folder color with an SF Symbol or an emoji — Hue Dada² ! leaves it exactly as it is. Your icon is yours: tagging such an item colors nothing, and nothing of yours is ever overwritten.
👉 Remove your custom icon and the item becomes ordinary again: the next time Hue Dada² ! sees it, it is colored like any other.
The Finder gives you seven colors. Any Color gives you all of them.
It is an optional, one-time purchase — no subscription — and it unlocks a single idea: any Finder tag can be given any color you like, and the files carrying it are colored accordingly. Everything else in Hue Dada² ! stays free.
The table already lists the colorless tags found in the folders you watch, plus the three macOS ships with — Home, Work and Important. Any other tag can be added with Add Tag.
Click the swatch at the left of a row and choose Choose Color… to open the color picker. The Crayons box is a good place to start: Cayenne, Honeydew, Mocha, Ocean… Point at a swatch and a small ▾ appears beside the dot — a cue that it is clickable.
The color is applied as you pick it: the icons of the files carrying that tag are recolored right away.
You do not have to buy first: the Colors tab works before the purchase too — add your tags, pick your colors, get a feel for it. They start coloring your icons the moment Any Color is bought.
Any Color belongs to your Apple Account, not to this Mac. On another Mac — or after reinstalling — click Restore Purchases in the Advanced tab, and it comes back. You are never charged twice.
On macOS 26 (Tahoe), the Finder colors the folders carrying one of its seven colors, and Hue Dada² ! leaves those to it. But a folder carrying one of your own colored tags is colored by Hue Dada² ! — the Finder would never have touched it.
Starts Hue Dada² ! when you log in, so your icons stay in sync without your ever having to open the app.
macOS may ask you to confirm this in System Settings ▸ General ▸ Login Items; you can also turn it off there.
By default, the color is laid over the preview with a light hand: you read the file, and you see its color. Turn this on and the color takes over.
Off — the tag color is laid over the preview as a light wash.
On — the color takes the icon over.
Changing it restamps every icon Hue Dada² ! maintains, so the change is immediate.
A discreet sound when you add or remove a folder or a tag. Turn it off if you prefer silence.
For crowded menu bars: the tag icon appears only while a Hue Dada² ! window is open, and disappears when you close the last one. Hue Dada² ! keeps running, and keeps coloring.
👉 To bring it back, open Hue Dada² ! from the Finder, Launchpad or Spotlight — the settings reopen, and the icon is there again.
The bottom of the pane is where Any Color is bought — and restored, if you already own it. The previous page tells you what it does.
Nine times out of ten, it is one of these.
• Hue Dada² ! learns of a new tag through Spotlight, which takes a moment. Just after you add a busy folder, it may need longer — the spinner in the Status panel tells you it is at work.
• Only the folders listed in the General tab are watched — and everything inside them. A file anywhere else is invisible to Hue Dada² !.
• A tag with no color — Home, Work, Important, or one of your own — colors nothing on its own. Give it a color in the Colors tab: that is what Any Color is for.
• Files stored inside a Photos, Music or TV library — or inside an application — cannot be seen by Spotlight, so their tags are invisible to Hue Dada² !. The library, or the application itself, can be colored.
• Spotlight does not index network volumes, so Hue Dada² ! cannot follow tags there. Such a folder carries a ⚠️ badge in the list.
• iCloud Drive handles Finder tags inconsistently and with long delays, so Hue Dada² ! cannot reliably follow them there. Such a folder carries a ⚠️ badge in the list — keep it on your Mac, outside iCloud Drive, for reliable colors.
• On Tahoe, the Finder colors labeled folders itself. Hue Dada² ! deliberately leaves them to the system — the color you see is the system’s.
• Hue Dada² ! never touches an item you customized yourself — a pasted custom icon, or a folder you gave a symbol or an emoji on macOS 26. Remove your icon if you would rather have the tag color.
The color is not a passing effect: it is a real custom icon, written onto the file. That is what lets it survive when Hue Dada² ! is not running — and it is also why an icon can occasionally be left behind.
If you move a colored file out of every watched folder, Hue Dada² ! loses sight of it: it can no longer see the file, and cannot clean its icon. The file keeps the color it had.
Removing a folder from the list, on the other hand, cleans up properly: every icon it had colored goes back to normal before the folder is let go.
Select the file, press ⌘I to open Get Info, click the small icon in the top-left corner of the window, and press ⌫. The original icon comes back.
👉 Or simply move the file back into a watched folder and remove its tag: Hue Dada² ! will clean it for you.
In the Colors tab, some tags can be removed and others cannot. The ones that hold on are the tags already in use — a tag Hue Dada² ! found on a file inside a folder you watch.
A tag in use was discovered in your folders, not typed in by hand. If it were removed, the very next scan would find it again and put it straight back — so the button is disabled rather than handing you a row that keeps returning.
Set its color to No Color: its files stop being colored, while the row stays as long as the tag is still in use. Once you have removed that tag from your files in the Finder, Hue Dada² ! tidies the row away on its own. It happens within a moment — as soon as macOS notices the tag is gone — with no tab to switch.
The ones you added yourself that aren’t on any watched file — those are yours to organize however you like.
Hue Dada² ! writes the icon the way the Finder does when you paste one into a Get Info window: it is stored beside the file, not inside its content. The content of your document is never opened for writing, never rewritten, never touched.
The modification date is preserved as well — Hue Dada² ! puts it back exactly as it was, so no editor will ever tell you the file changed behind its back.
Hue Dada² ! runs in a sandbox: it can reach the folders you explicitly hand it, and nothing else on your Mac. It collects nothing, it sends nothing, it calls no one. It does not even need a network connection.
Remove your folders from the list first — that puts every icon back — then drag Hue Dada² ! to the Trash.
Write to us: every message is read.
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© 2015-2026, Frédéric Blondiau — DouWère, s.r.l.