I created a shortcut for the “Safely Remove Hardware” utility, but now I want to use a different icon for it. How?
Changing the icon for a desktop shortcut is really easy. Where most people trip up is finding an icon to choose from. The good news is that there’s a huge collection of icons already in Windows ready for your use, if you know where to look.
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If you’ve created a substitute safely remove hardware icon on your desktop, from my previous article on the subject, you probably have something that looks like this:
That would be the default icon for the shortcut.
To change the icon of this or almost any desktop shortcut, right-click on the shortcut and click on Properties:
Click on Change Icon…:
This is where things get interesting. You’ll see that exactly one icon is presented for you to choose from. That icon is actually extracted from the shortcut target, in this case, rundll.exe. But using the Browse… button we can select a different file to get the shortcut from:
Note that I’ve selected shell32.dll, or more completely “C:\Windows\System32\shell32.dll“. Press OK, and the Change Icon dialog suddenly has many icons to choose from:
On my system, I have something like 234 icons to choose from. After selecting one and OKing my way out, my desktop shortcut now looks like this:
Naturally, you can select other files containing icons including most .exe and .dll files, as well as .ico icon files. However, with 200+ icons to choose from in shell32.dll it’s rare that I need to look anywhere else for something appropriate.
Leo, thanks for the additional places to look for icons. Here is what I did and anyone please feel free to advise if this is not a good idea.
Many items on the All Programs list had the plain generic folder icon. It looked like a sea of vanilla folders. Made a new folder on the Desktop (or in My Documents) to store the more descriptive icons that correspond to each program. Found these in the program files. Select and copy a file showing its icon (not a shortcut icon) into the new folder. Icon may copy with the .exe or another suffix. Change the suffix of the copied icon to .ico.
Then, in All Programs, to change the icon of a program, right click it, choose properties, customize, change icon. Browse to your folder; open, select the icon, choose apply, OK, etc. One caution, clicking “restore default” changed all the icons on All Programs back to the plain vanilla folders. (Fortunately was able to use System Restore to fix this.)
Hi,
This is what’s happening: I have some shockwave games shortcuts on my desktop and they are now blank (the little box white inside with the icon “arrow” showing. I couldnt’ access the game, it says the “the shortcut.exe is missing” and it gave me the option to find it myself.
I restarted the computer and the icons are now showing thru with the proper names but once again, I click on them and gives me the same message. (does that make sense to you?) I can’t access any of my games…. help!!
how can I make my own icon – I’d like to use the company logo for a little icon top open web browser that goes to our internal homepage…do I have to buy specialized software or can this be done with some type of free software? 🙂
Thank you!
29-Dec-2009
Try taking a screenshot of the original icon, before it reverts to the generic one. Then paste it into a graphics editor and eliminate all but the icons within is own boundaries. Then name and save this file as an .ico or if your graphics program does not save in this format then and go to the favicon generator (link above) and upload it for the conversion.
If you can get a list of Windows icons to chose from but Dos programs or other programs revert to a generic icon then take a screenshot of the list and edit out the one you would like and follow the procedures above.
Here’s an article from TechSupportAlert giving the location of several files already on your computer which contain thousands icons you can use.
I keep shortcuts on the desktop to frequently visited websites, like Reddit, my local public library catalogue, Merriam Webster’s Blossom wordgame and the local (to me) weather. Of course I could screenshot something on each site, crop it, and convert it to an ico file, but I’m surprised there isn’t an automated way of doing this.
For simple editing, I use Irfanview. It takes a couple of seconds to crop and can save in the .ico format. I tried it just now for a graphic on this page, and it took me 20-30 seconds.