Do you have certain folders that you access often each day but are only available through the Places Menu or Nautilus? See how easy it is to create shortcuts for your desktop and taskbar with our quick tutorial.

To get started open Nautilus and locate the folders that you want to make new shortcuts for. For our example we chose Ubuntu One. Right click on the chosen folder and select Make Link.

Your new shortcut will appear with the text Link to “Folder Name” and an Arrow Shortcut Marker attached.

If you are happy with your new shortcut as is, then drag it to your desktop or taskbar as desired. We created the shortcut twice in our example…once for the desktop and once for the taskbar.

For our example we decided to customize the taskbar shortcut a bit. To customize your shortcut right click on the shortcut and select Properties.

Note: The desktop shortcut is limited on the amount you can customize it (name change and addition of up to four emblems to the folder).

From here you can rename the shortcut and change the icon as desired.

A quick name change and new icon made a huge improvement in how our taskbar shortcut looked.

Note: The link for the icon we used is shown below.

A little touch-up to our desktop shortcut and both are looking good.

Download the Ubuntu Cloud Icon *Icon is 128*128 pixels and comes in .png format.