We are working in GLIB to attach an icon to XDG user special directories, so filemanagers using GIO (such as nautilus) would be advantaged by this, showing user directories with fancy icons.
Currently only the desktop icon is present, so what we need is:
- Documents dir
- Music dir
- Videos dir
- Pictures dir
- Templates dir (a directory which contains the templates for creating new files)
- Public shares dir
The possibility to use emblems instead of icons was discarded, because they are small and have a limited expressive capacity.
You can follow the GLIB status here: https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=541276 (the patch is almost ready)
You can follow the icon naming choiche here: https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=584286
We don't have any people working on the icons yet. Can you help?
Ideas
I've attached two ideas on how it could be executed. Let's discuss this, you'll find me in #gnome-art most of the time 
Also, as andreasn pointed out - perhaps it would be a good idea to get rid of folders completely and just have an "a bunch of photos" for folder for "Photos". It also makes sense since Computer,Trash and Desktop arent "folder icons" as well. MartinLettner made a preview picture how this could look like.
Comments
Isn't this fixed in gnome-icon-theme (2.29) trunk now?