Mar 22, 2012 If you need to extract an icon from a program file or other type of file (such as.dll files), there are many free tools available that make the task easy. However, very few will extract high quality icon images from the files. Most free icon extraction tools will extract smaller icon image sizes, such as 16×16, 32×32, or 48×48 pixels. Scan Icons in Selected Processes – This is a nice option that simply lists out the currently running processes on your computer and lets you choose one of them to extract icons from. Asus p7p55d e drivers windows 10. After the search is complete, you will find the icons displayed in the main window of the program.
How to Extract an Icon from an EXE or DLL File in Windows 10
In this post, we will review a few tools that allow extracting icons from files in Windows 10. Windows allows using icons hardcoded to binary files like DLL and EXE for Desktop shortcut icons, but doesn't come with any option to extract those icons and save as ICO or PNG files. Here's how it can be done.
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The ICO file format is an image file format used for app and shortcut icons in Windows. An ICO file contains one or more images at multiple sizes and color depths, so they can look well with various screen resolutions and scaling. Traditionally, executable files include an icon in ICO format bundled, so they appear in the Start menu, and on Desktop as icons for the shortcuts. However, it is possible to assign a custom icon to a shortcut by loading it from an external *.ICO file, *.EXE file, *.DLL file, or from any other file that has icon resources.
In Windows 10. there are plenty of good icons in the following files:
C:Windowssystem32shell32.dll
C:Windowssystem32imageres.dll
C:Windowssystem32moricons.dll
C:Windowsexplorer.exe
C:Windowssystem32imageres.dll
C:Windowssystem32moricons.dll
C:Windowsexplorer.exe
To extract an icon from a file, you need to use a third-party tool. There are plenty of tools available for that purpose. I'll cover three trusted freeware tools I personally love and use.
We will start with Resource Hacker, the tool that doesn't require to be introduced. It is a famous resource editor app.
To Extract Icon from EXE or DLL File in Windows 10,
- Download Resource Hacker.
- Install the app.
- Launch the app from the Start menu.
- In the app, go to the File > Open menu, or press Ctrl + O to browse for the file you want to extract an icon from (I will open c:windowsexplorer.exe).
- In the left pane, expand the Icon group and navigate to the desired icon (use the preview area on the right).
- From the menu, select Action > Save *.ico resource.
- Browse for the folder to store your ICO file and give it a name. You can put it right in your Desktop folder. Then click on Save.
You are done! The icon is now extracted and saved to the *.ico file:
A few notes
- Resource Hacker is a 32-bit app. If you are running it in a 64-bit Windows 10 version, it may fail to open certain system files. In this case you can copy them to another directory, e.g. you can copy the c:windowssystem32shell32.dll file to c:data and open the c:datashell32.dll file in Resource Hacker. This always works.
- By saving individual icons from the Icon group, you are getting an ICO file with a single icon size inside. This may or may not be convenient, depending on for what you are trying to extract the icon.
- To get an ICO file with all the available icon sizes, navigate to the Icon Group node in the left pane, expand it, and then repeats the steps from the above starting with the step #6.
Some users may find using Resource Hacker a bit complicated. So, here are a couple of alternative apps, IconViewer and IcoFX, which will additionally allow you to save icon resources to other image formats, including PNG and BMP.
Extract an Icon from EXE or DLL Files with IconViewer
![Icon Extractor Icon Extractor](https://images.sftcdn.net/images/t_app-cover-l,f_auto/p/679ed270-9b38-11e6-9d24-00163ed833e7/321477885/batch-icon-extractor-screenshot.jpg)
- Download IconViewer. It has both 32-bit and 64-bit versions for your 32-bit or 64-bit OS.
- Install the app.
- Open File Explorer and navigate to the destination folder that contains the file you want to extract icons from. E.g., go to
c:WindowsSystem32
. - Right-click on the file with icons, e.g.
shell32.dll
, and select Properties from the context menu. - Switch to the Icons tab added by the IconViewer app.
- Select the icon you want to extract, and click on the floppy disk icon to save it to a file.
- Specify the destination folder, file name, and select the file format (ICO, PNG, or BMP) to save the icon. Click on the Save button.
- The icon is now saved.
You are done. IconViewer is a convenient and easy-to-use app that will save your time every time you need to extract an icon from a file in Windows 10.
Finally, there is yet another Freeware tool that you can use. It is called IcoFX (the official IcoFX web site). It was a freeware app, but recent app versions require a paid license. Lucky, FileHippo still hosts its last freeware version 1.6.4.
Using IcoFX
The main difference of IcoFX from apps mentioned above is that IcoFX is a full featured icon editor. Resource Hacker allows modifying binary files. IconViewer is just an icon resource extractor. With help of IcoFX you can draw you own icons using a number of drawing tools and graphical effects.
Here's how to use it.
To extract an icon from a file with IcoFX,
- Download the app (or buy the most recent version).
- Select File > Open from the menu (or press Ctrl + O).
- Select a file to extract an icon from.
- You will see a dialog with all icons the app was able to find in the file.
- Select the icon and click on Extract. This will open the icon in the editor.
- To extract an icon of the specific size, right-click on its thumbnail in the left pane of the editor and select Export Image.. from the context menu.
- Specify the folder to store the file, the desired file format (PNG, BMP, JPEG, GIF, or JP2), and give the name to your file.
- Click on the Save button.
You are done!
To save the extracted icon as an ICO file, the sequence is a little bit different.
To save the extracted icon as an ICO file with IcoFX,
- Select File > Open from the menu (or press Ctrl + O).
- Select a file to extract an icon from.
- You will see a dialog with all icons the app was able to find in the file.
- Select the icon and click on Extract. This will open the icon in the editor.
- Now, press CTRL + S or go to the File > Save menu.
- Specify the folder to store the file, and give the name to your file.
- You can choose between the Windows icon file format (*.ico) and Macintosh icons (*.icns)
- Click on the Save button.
You are done. This will write all the icons of sizes and format displayed in the editor to your ICO file.
That's it!
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Wish you could extract all of icons stored on your computer? Have you ever wondered where all those icons you see are actually located? Finding high quality icons on your computer is difficult and mostly because applications store their icons directly in the EXE (executable) file itself, which indirectly hides those icons from you.
In this article, I’ll mention a couple of tools you can use to extract icons from the applications already installed on your computer. You can use these programs to save the icon files as images or as ICO files of different sizes.
IconsExtract
IconsExtract is a freeware application that you can use to automatically find icons that are stored in EXE, DLL, OCX, CPL, and other file types. You’ll be amazed at the actual number of icons stored on your computer after using this program!
The program is a standalone executable and does not require any installation at all, which means you can run it on any computer easily! You can also filter the search by icons or cursors, by icon size, and even by the color depth.
Icon Extractor Download
You have 2 main search options when you startup the program:
Scan Icons in Files – For example: C:Windowssystem32shell32.dll – This is the default value when you load the program.
You can either manually type in the filename into the textbox, or select it from a dialog box by clicking the Browse Files button. You can also select multiple filenames by using wildcard characters (? and *).
In addition to just files, you can scan a folder by clicking the Browse Folders button. If you check the Search Subfolders checkbox, all of the subfolders of the main folder will also be scanned. For example, if you click browse folders, select C:Program Files (x86) and then check the subfolders box, you’ll be able to search all files of all installed programs for icons!
Scan Icons in Selected Processes – This is a nice option that simply lists out the currently running processes on your computer and lets you choose one of them to extract icons from.
After the search is complete, you will find the icons displayed in the main window of the program. You can then save the icons into ICO files by selecting the ones you want to save and then choosing Save Selected Icons from the File menu.
You can also copy a single icon to the clipboard and paste it into another application by pressing the standard CTRL + C key combo. This will copy the icon in the standard dimensions of 16×16 or 32×32. If you want to copy a different size, double click on the icon and select the specific image in the properties window and click Copy Selected Image.
BeCylconGrabber
Not sure what’s up with the funny name, but BeCylconGrabber is a useful little tool for grabbing high quality icons from application executables. I like this program slightly better than IconsExtract because it has a nicer interface and cleaner look. I don’t think IconsExtract has been updated since 2010, so that’s quite a while back.
Anyway, this program is also portable and doesn’t require an installation. Just run the EXE file and you’ll get the main program window with three tabs on the left and a preview window on the right.
Under the Directory tab, you can browse to an individual file and see the icons for that particular DLL or EXE, etc. Let’s say I wanted to get a nice icon for Google Chrome, I would just browse to the chrome.exe file.
Icon Extractor Fan
As you can see, the preview window lists out all the different sizes for the icon stored in that executable. To save the icon, click on it and then click the Save button or just double-click on the icon. You’ll get a customized save dialog where you can save it out as an icon with all the different sizes and color depths.
If you want to save it as an image file, just click on the Save as type box and change it to BMP or PNG and then choose of the formats. So that’s how you can extract icons from a particular file. Now if you wanted to scan for all the icons in a particular directory, you click on the Search tab and then click on the New Search button.
Choose a directory and then choose whether to recursively search all subdirectories or not. The min number of symbols means the lowest number of icons that have to be in a file for it to show in the search results. Max is set to 10,000 and that really should be large enough.
If you don’t click on anything on the left side, it’ll show you all the icons for that particular size that it found. You can also click on a particular file from the search results and it’ll show you just those icons from that file. Lastly, you can select an icon and then press the Favorites button, which will add it to the Favorites tab where you can easily access them without having to search again.
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These are pretty much the two best programs getting good quality icons out of an application file. There are some other programs that work, but they only let you extract 16×16 or 32×32 sizes, which is useless in my opinion.
Powershell Extract Icon From Exe
Now that you have your new icons, you might want to use it to create a custom icon for your flash drive. If you couldn’t find a good icon on your computer, you can convert your own images into icons and use those! Enjoy!