IconViewer supports both BMP and PNG image formats. Highlight the required size and color depth then click the Save As button below. All embedded icons for that file will be shown in the window, highlight which one you want and all available sizes and bit depths are shown for the specific icon along with a preview. It also works differently to other tools here because IconViewer needs installing and could be more useful to people that frequently need to extract icon images from executable or library files.Īfter installation simply right click on an executable or DLL, select Properties and then click the Icons tab.
IconViewer has not been updated since 2008 but it still works in the latest Windows 10 64-bit.
Perhaps surprisingly you can only save to the BMP image format so the icon background will not be saved with transparency like you would get with a PNG image. Right click on the icon you want and select Save to Bitmap. Click on an icon and its available sizes and resolutions will appear to the right. Use the folder and file browsers at the top to find the executable or library, click on it and all the icons in the file will display in the lower middle pane.
Icon Explorer is a standalone portable executable and has some useful functions such as an in built search that filters all files in a specific folder that include icons, selecting a custom background color for the icons and the ability to show pretty much everything in the one window.
NET 3.5 is required so Windows 8 and 10 users will be asked to install it. Thumbico comes in portable and installer versions. Limitations when extracting icons specifically include it doesn’t actually tell you the icon size and only the first icon in the file will be shown, so subsequent icons are not viewable. Images can be saved as JPG, GIF, BMP and PNG. There are a few editing functions that include rotate/flip, choosing a background color and resizing the output image to a preset size or custom dimension. Simply browse for or drag and drop a file onto the window and press the menu button > Save Image As. If there is an embedded icon inside it will be shown, if not, you will get an image of the file type’s icon or the image/frame of an image file or video. What makes Thumbico quite useful is it’s able to extract an icon sized image or thumbnail from just about any file.
An easier way requiring fewer steps is using a program to extract the icon from the binary file and save it out directly as an image file, here are 5 free tools to try out. One option would be to extract the icon image to an individual ICO file and there are many tools around that can do it, but that requires an extra step after of converting the icon file to an image format such as PNG. Windows itself also has thousands of icons which you might want to make use of spread across dozens of system files. For that, extracting an icon from the program’s EXE or DLL is an option. For example, we use thumbnail size images on the blog and if we want to write about a specific program we might decide to use one of its icons as the related thumbnail. There are many reasons why you might want to extract an icon from inside another file such as a program executable or DLL library. This allows a 256 pixel icon image to look as clear and sharp as a 32 pixel icon image and not need artificially resizing if both resolutions are included inside the icon file. What makes ICO files different to those formats is the ability to embed several different image sizes directly into the file along with differing color depths. The type used by icons in Windows is the. Many different types of image or graphic formats are available that you can use on a computer, such as JPG, PNG, GIF, TIF and BMP.