Where are the emblems coming from on the default folders?

Question

On a fresh Ubuntu, you usually have these default (empty) folders:

• Downloads
• Documents
• Music
• Videos
• ...

all with special emblems.

BUT, where are these Emblems coming from?, what's telling Nautilus to display these emblems? Now that Nautilus has dropped Emblems support, I am unable to inspect or change these emblems via GUI. Just being curious here...

Update

As I posted as comment to Uri's answer: everyone here, is right: I was confusing emblems with folder-specific icons in this case. But: let me rephrase my question:

Why does, for example, Nautilus know that it has to apply a special icon for these directories? Is there some flag on the actual dir, a metadata field in GVFS or is this hard-coded into Nautilus?

(running Ubuntu 12.04.1)

Answer 1

Those are not emblems, in the image below you can see that the emblems are located in the lower right part of the Item (in this case is a symlink/shortcut).

The Icons for the user folders usually have a little representation of what that folder is all about. Those folders are "special" and are different from the rest of the folders on your system. In this example the folder is Shared/Public stuff, next to this is a regular folder.

Icons are located in two locations:

1. ~/.icons
2. /usr/share/icons

Depending on the the icon theme, they will placed in different categories (most are in /places).

This will help you understand it better:

• What is the meaning of the default directories in the Linux filesystem hierachy?

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Why does, for example, Nautilus know that it has to apply a special icon for these directories? Is there some flag on the actual dir, a metadata field in GVFS or is this hard-coded into Nautilus?

It's a standard set by the freedesktop organization called xdg-user-dirs.

From the site:

xdg-user-dirs is a tool to help manage "well known" user directories like the desktop folder and the music folder. It also handles localization (i.e. translation) of the filenames.

The way it works is that xdg-user-dirs-update is run very early in the login phase.

This program reads a configuration file, and a set of default directories. It then creates localized versions of these directories in the users home directory and sets up a config file in $(XDG_CONFIG_HOME)/user-dirs.dirs (XDG_CONFIG_HOME defaults to ~/.config) that applications can read to find these directories.

You can read more about the XDG Base Directory Specification here.

Answer 2

The icons are determined by the desktop-theme you are using- you can find them under /usr/share/icons/<ThemeName>/places

With Humanity that would then be /usr/share/icons/Humanity/places

Answer 3

At least in 13.04, they are emblems, and they can be changed. Changing the icon gets rid of the folder, which for me wasn't what was desired.

I only had a handful of folders I wanted to do this to, so I didn't feel I needed the gui tools. Also, none of them worked for me in 13.04 (which I realize isn't what you have). The below did.

gvfs-set-attribute -t stringv file_name metadata::emblems emblem_name default

You can find the possible short names and the images that are applied with them in /usr/share/icons/Humanity/emblems (if you are using the default icon theme, otherwise look in your custom icon theme.)

For example, I did:

gvfs-set-attribute -t stringv ~/Sites metadata::emblems marketing art

Answer 4

You can use the Emblemize script to edit and inspect emblems (works with 11.10 and 12.04)

Installation

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:dr3mro/nautilus-actions-extra
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install nautilus-actions nautilus-actions-extra nautilus-gksu

Re-start Nautilus...

nautilus -q

Result: