How to Extract the Icons of Any File on Windows

Do you want to extract your favorite program’s icons for personal use?

Are you tired of looking for high-resolution icons for your graphics?

As you have noticed, I sometimes use the program icons on the featured images on Easytutorial.com and it’s time to reveal my easy and quick method to retrieve these icons, without internet.

Extracting program icons can be useful either for using them on your images or customizing your own files/folders on Windows.

In this tutorial you will discover with me the IconsExtract tool, allowing you to get the icons of folders and files EXE, DLL, OCX, CPL and many more.

We will also see the Resource Hacker utility which provides many more choices when extracting your icons

1. Use IconsExtract to retrieve your icons.

You can download IconsExtract from the developer’s official website (Nirsoft) via this link: http://www.nirsoft.net/utils/iconsext.html  (Click on “Download” at the bottom of the page)

Once the zip file has been downloaded, unzip its content to have the iconsext.exe file

To recover some system icons, IconsExtract will offer you the file shell32.dll [/ c] which contains a large part of Windows icons; to access the other icons use these:

• C:\\WINDOWS\system32\imageres.dll
• C:\\WINDOWS\explorer.exe
• C:\\WINDOWS\system32\ddores.dll
• C:\\WINDOWS\system32\moricons.dll
• C:\\WINDOWS\system32\netcenter.dll
• C:\\WINDOWS\system32\netshell.dll

Once you have put the system file that you want to analyze click on “Search for icons“.

You can also recover the icon of a running program, using the choice “Scan icons in the selected process:”

And if you want to specify an exact file, click on “Browse Files…”

Here I chose to apply this tutorial on Visual Studio Code (VS Code).

Click on “Open“.

After the analysis IconsExtract will display all the icons it has found, click on the save icon to save them in a folder.

Then click on “Save Icons” after choosing the destination folder.

2. Collect icons with Resource Hacker

Resource Hacker is a free utility for scanning and recovering hidden file resources on Windows.

To download it click on ” Download ” on the official website here:  http://www.angusj.com/resourcehacker/

To analyze a file and recover its icon, click on the folder icon then choose the program that interests you.

Go to ” Icon Group” in the side list then right-click on the icon you want to save.

Here is the result

There you go

If you need help feel free to leave your comments!

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