With the ever growing amount of cloud storage provides, I seemly have a folder for each one. I wanted to have all of these folders alongside of the local HD accessible from my desktop so I decided to symlink them!

Symlinks are a way to create a shortcut to a folder or file. This is useful when you want to access a folder or file from a different location. Unfortunately, I didn’t see a way to create a shortcut with the icon from Finder.

Here is how I did it.

This guide assumes you are using macOS Sequoia (15.0.1) or later and have installed the cloud storage providers’ applications.

Box

Open Terminal and type:

ln -s /Users/$USER/Library/CloudStorage/Box-Box /Users/$USER/Desktop/Box

Dropbox

Open Terminal and type:

ln -s /Users/$USER/Library/CloudStorage/Dropbox /Users/$USER/Desktop/Dropbox

Google Drive

Open Terminal and type:

ln -s /Users/$USER/Library/CloudStorage/GoogleDrive-<GOOGLE-USERNAME> /Users/$USER/Desktop/GoogleDrive<GOOGLE-USERNAME>

Please replace <GOOGLE-USERNAME> with your Google username.

iCloud

Open Terminal and type:

ln -s "/Users/$USER/Library/Mobile Documents/com~apple~CloudDocs" /Users/$USER/Desktop/iCloud

Specific iCloud Folders

You can individually map folders in iCloud onto your desktop by searching for the application specific folder and, then, modifying the above symlink. For example, if I wanted to understand where keynotes are, I would use:

ls -a "/Users/$USER/Library/Mobile Documents/" | grep "^com~apple"
# dr-x------@  82 $USER  staff   2624 Aug  3  2023 .
# drwx------@ 115 $USER  staff   3680 Oct 11 13:46 ..
# -rw-r--r--@   1 $USER  staff  32772 Oct 11 13:56 .DS_Store
# drwx------@   2 $USER  staff     64 Oct 11 13:46 .Trash
# drwxr-xr-x    3 $USER  staff     96 Oct 11 13:46 com~apple~Automator
# drwxr-xr-x    5 $USER  staff    160 Oct 11 13:46 com~apple~CloudDocs
# drwxr-xr-x    5 $USER  staff    160 Oct  6 13:46 com~apple~Keynote
# drwxr-xr-x    9 $USER  staff    288 Oct 11 13:46 com~apple~Numbers
# drwxr-xr-x    4 $USER  staff    128 Oct 11 13:46 com~apple~Pages
# drwxr-xr-x    3 $USER  staff     96 Oct 11 13:46 com~apple~Preview
# drwxr-xr-x    3 $USER  staff     96 Oct 11 13:46 com~apple~iBooks~cloudData
# drwxr-xr-x    5 $USER  staff    160 Oct 11 13:46 com~apple~mail

Then, use:

ln -s "/Users/$USER/Library/Mobile Documents/com~apple~Keynote" /Users/$USER/Desktop/iCloud-Keynotes

Verify Symlinks

You can verify the symlinks are setup correctly by either clicking on the symlink on your desktop or by typing in the Terminal:

ls -la /Users/$USER/Desktop | grep -E "^l.*?(Box|Dropbox|GoogleDrive|iCloud)"
# lrwxr-xr-x@   1 $USER  staff         41 Oct 11 13:45 Box -> /Users/ronin/Library/CloudStorage/Box-Box
# lrwxr-xr-x@   1 $USER  staff         41 Oct 11 13:53 Dropbox -> /Users/ronin/Library/CloudStorage/Dropbox
# lrwxr-xr-x@   1 $USER  staff         70 Oct 11 13:44 GoogleDrive -> /Users/ronin/Library/CloudStorage/GoogleDrive-<GOOGLE-USERNAME>
# lrwxr-xr-x@   1 $USER  staff         57 Oct 11 13:57 iCloud -> /Users/ronin/Library/Mobile Documents/com~apple~CloudDocs

Fin

That’s it! You should now have symlinks to your cloud storage folders on your desktop. Now, if only we could get file icons on symlinks in Finder…