Custom DMG Background Image - New Version
ShareThis was Murphy’s second entry in the Macinstruct tutorial contest. Murphy didn’t win anything. Maybe next year. If you want to check out the winning entries follow this link and take a look at numbers 26, 6, and 18. They’re the winners. Congrats!
We posted something like this last year, but this screencast does things just a little bit differently. Instead of showing hidden files in Finder to set the background image Murphy uses the ln command in Terminal to create a soft link to the image file. One advantage is that you don’t have to go back and turn off the display of hidden files when you’re done.
Murphy thinks this is a great way to send someone files - if you know the recipient is using a Mac. Using your company logo as a background can give your materials that extra touch that sets them apart.
Click here to see Murphy’s original custom dmg post.
NOTE: This isn’t working the same way in Leopard. I don’t have a solution yet.
10. July 2007 at 1:24 pm :
I really liked this screencast. It’s a simple set of operations that add a nice professional feel.
Great job, Murphy.
10. July 2007 at 1:35 pm :
I watched one of the winning entries (No. 26, ‘Making your Mac more comfortable’) and I nearly died of boredom. The tutorial was garbled and incomprehensible . Better luck next year Murphy, keep up the good work!
10. July 2007 at 6:51 pm :
Thanks guys. Maybe next year….
1. February 2008 at 9:10 am :
Does not work for me on Leopard.
1. February 2008 at 2:19 pm :
me either. I’ll update the post. Thanks.
28. February 2008 at 1:02 am :
Murphy, I recently happened across your site, and want to say I think it’s fantastic. Very nice stuff. Keep up the great work.
So if you wouldn’t mind, after looking at your tutorial, I figured out what needs to be modified to make it work in Leopard.
The first glitch is after renaming the file to be invisible via the Terminal, you can no longer select the image as the background in the “Show View Options” (CMD+J). If you select the .jpg file before renaming it, and set it as the background image of the dmg, you can then mv /Volumes/tutorial/background.jpg .background.jpg. That also allows you to skip the make and delete alias step.
Lastly, instead of making the final .dmg by File | New | Disk Image from Folder…, you can use the Images | Convert… command. This seems to give me reliable results in OS X 10.4.x and 10.5.x, PPC and x86.
Cheers,
Scott
28. February 2008 at 2:20 am :
Thanks Scott. I’ll give that a try and update the post with my results.
As far as the first glitch goes, you weren’t selecting the actual file, you were selecting the alias to it. The way it worked in Tiger was that the alias was to the invisible file. Selecting the alias as the background REALLY selected the invisible file, leaving you free to delete the alias afterwards.
I know I tried your mv method at some point with Tiger, and I believe it failed. For me the only true test was to move the dmg to another computer and make sure you could still see the image.
It could be that my last step was what broke it, and your last step is what preserves it?
Anyway - I’ll test and let you know how I do.
19. May 2008 at 12:18 am :
For leapord—
All you have to do is create a read/write image of your files. Then to get a background- just add your image to the disk, select that picture in View Options & “/developer/tools/setfile -V PATHTOIMAGE” in the terminal.
28. September 2008 at 3:35 pm :
Hello Murphy,
Just yesterday I was wondering how to add a background image to a DMG file. Thanks so much for your easily-understood tutorial. It worked great the first time that I tried it! BTW, I am still on a Tiger machine.
9. July 2009 at 7:37 am :
Hey Guys, For a complete video and PDF tutorial on how to do this with the latest version of leopard (10.5.7) Check out these links
Download CustomDmgTut-v1.dmg here: http://www.mediafire.com/download.php?mxjwtd3zzwj
That download includes the video, but you can also watch it on youtube at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZBmx8nOkkbo
Hope this helps out!
17. November 2009 at 11:09 pm :
I am not able to get the custom background image to appear regardless of hiding it or not in Snow Leopard. It works until I create the disk image, but upon mounting it is never shown. Why oh why is that?