Extract program icons with IconsExtract

Filed under: Utilities, Windows, Freeware

Extract program icons with IconsExtract

by Brad Linder Jan 16th 2008

Have you ever wanted to find a program icon so you could apply it to another application or just copy and paste the pretty picture into an image or Word document? While some program icons are clearly labeled as ICO files, others are hidden inside of EXE, DLL, OCX and CPL files. But you can still get at them, using the freeware application IconsExtract.

Here's how it works. You choose a directory to scan and IconsExtract will search through any files that might contain icons. If you search a particular file, like say C:\WINNT\System32\shell32.dll, the search will be super-fast. If you scan your entire program files directory it might take a bit longer.

When IconsExtract is done scanning it'll display a list of available icons. You can save them to ICO or CUR files, or copy an image to your clipboard.

[via gHacks]

Tags: ICO, icons, IconsExtract

Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)

James said 5:18PM on 1-16-2008

For those who don't know, Visual Studio can (kind of) do this too. If you File -- Open a DLL, EXE, or other compiled file that contains icons as resources, it'll give you a resource explorer that lets you save individual resources as separate files.

Also, if you create a shortcut on the desktop, you can "Change Icon" for the shortcut, and point to any EXE/DLL/etc as the icon source. You can't *save* the icons this way, but you can see the icons that are contained in the file.

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