7zip Icon Change

[Billy Cromer]

Ive been using 7-zip for a long time. Any archive that 7-zip recognizes was given a black and white [7z] icon. I just switched from Win7 32 bit to Win7 64 bit, and when I reinstalled 7-zip all of the recognized archives have different icons. They look like folders with a small blue text character on it. I don't like these at all. For me they are easy to confuse with folders and other stuff. The black and white icons from before were very easily distinguishable from other file types and I liked that.

I figured this was due to a newer version of 7-zip so I reinstalled an older version that I've had stored for a long time but the icons still haven't reverted back to the black and white ones that I am used to.

I did find a utility called File Types Manager that can change the icons for specific file types, but it seems as though that still only lets me change the icon for a single file extension at a time (and as of now 7-zip is associated with 35 extensions) rather than on a per-application basis.

Alternately, you can reinstall the latest version (preferable) and use something like the 7-Zip Theme Manager to easily change the icons and much more besides, instead of manually editing the DLLs using Resource Hacker or similar:

I'm sure there are some themes in there with icons you'd like, and perhaps even themes that include the older icons. If not, you can always try creating your own theme using the icons extracted from the older version of the program's DLL.

You get the boring yellow archive files with the blue letter in the corner if you tell 7zip to associate itself with the file extensions. If you remove those associations and then right-click --> Properties on a compressed archive, then click the "Change..." button next to "Opens with:" and select 7zFM.exe (wherever you installed 7zip, C:\Program Files\7zip\ by default), it will associate those archives to 7zip, but it will use 7zFM's icon on those compressed archives rather than the yellow/blue ones you get when you associate 7zip to archives from within 7zip's settings.

7-Zip is a fantastic Windows program for advanced file zipping, whether you're password-protecting your archives or just trying to compress them down even smaller. There's just one problem: its icons are ugly as sin.

Normally, I wouldn't mind too much that an app is ugly--especially one as mundane as a file archiver. But it's not just 7-Zip's in-app icons. It also changes your Windows icons for ZIP, 7Z, TGZ, and other archive file types to these horrific, blurry, pre-Vista-looking icons that permeate my hard drive. (See the screenshot above.)

Thankfully, there's a free, portable tool called 7-Zip Theme Manager that fixes this right up in minutes. Head to the program's download page and download both the 2.1 and 2.1.1 applications. Extract the 2.1 archive to a folder on your system (it's portable, so there's no installation necessary), then extract the 7zTM.exe from the 2.1.1 "hotfix" archive into that same folder, replacing the 7zTM.ext that was already there. Then double-click that EXE to start it up.

If you're on Windows 10, you may get a warning saying that 7-Zip Theme Manager isn't supported in your version of Windows. Just click OK--I've been using it on Windows 10 and haven't experienced any issues.

You'll be greeted with the main window. In the upper left-hand corner, you can choose to browse icon themes for 7-Zip's toolbar, or browse icon themes for 7-Zip's file types in Windows Explorer. let's start with Toolbar Themes.

Again, browse the left sidebar to view the different themes available. The "Vista Azure" theme is the most similar to Windows' default ZIP icons, so that's what I've chosen. (Note that some themes, including Vista Azure, don't include every possible icon, some more obscure formats may still have the old icons. You'll have to experiment.)

Honestly the icons themselves are not bad, they're well defined, but still a change is needed in my opinion.

I have uploaded a ZIP archive that contains all the assets of the new icons, I've premade Favicons, Program Icons, Banners (Logo and Download), and Uninstall Icon.

I tried to be as close to the original icons as possible, the main difference would be contrast on the logo/banner images, and in other icons it would be presence of anti-aliasing, which is much better than the pixelated variants.

Finally, I found that 7z SelF-eXtracting installer is very easy for me. Ubuntu has p7zip, it can make 7z compress file, and can use sfx module to make windows 7z SelF-eXtracting installer by this command: cat 7zSD.sfx installer_config installer.7z > installer.exe

Everything is OK. The only problem is how to change the exe icon ? I want my installer have some different icons. Use script or some cli software is better because my server have no X and I want batched operation.

Concatenating data together will seldom generate a valid PE executable unless you modify the PE header to consider that extra data. It might actually "work" right now because the Windows version is forgiving in loading the file and the 7z executable loads the payload from disk but the fact remains that your PE executable is invalid and might not work on some Windows versions.

The good news though is that by using a resource compiler you will solve both your problems: Both the icon and the payload are typically resources so you could have an "empty" 7z executable that you add an icon and your data to using a resource compiler.

You must run 7-Zip File Manager in administrator mode. Right-click the icon of 7-Zip File Manager, and then click Run as administrator.Then you can change file associations and some other options.

You can get big difference in compression ratio for different sorting methods,if dictionary size is smaller than total size of files.If there are similar files in different folders, the sorting "by type" can provide better compression ratio in some cases.

Note that sorting "by type" has some drawbacks.For example, NTFS volumes use sorting order "by name", so if an archive uses another sorting, then the speed of some operations for files with unusual order can fall on HDD devices (HDDs have low speed for "seek" operations).

If you have such archive, please don't call the 7-Zip developers about it.Instead try to find the program that was used to create the archive and inform the developers of that program that their software is not ZIP-compatible.

7-Zip doesn't know folder path of drop target.Only Windows Explorer knows exact drop target.And Windows Explorer needs files (drag source) as decompressed files on disk.So 7-Zip extracts files from archive to temp folder and then 7-Zip notifies Windows Explorer about paths of these temp files.Then Windows Explorer copies these files to drop target folder.

You're probably using a *.* wildcard. 7-Zip doesn't use the operating system's wildcard mask parser, and consequently treats *.* as any file that has an extension. To process all files you must use the * wildcard instead or omit the wildcard altogether.

7-Zip stores only relative paths of files (without drive letter prefix).You can change current folder to folder that is common for all files that you want to compress and then you can use relative paths:

32-bit Windows allocates only 2 GB of virtual space per one application. Also that block of 2 GB can be fragmented (for example, by some DLL file), so 7-Zip can't allocate one big contiguous block of virtual space.There are no such limitations in 64-bit Windows. So you can use any dictionary in Windows x64, if you have required amount of physical RAM.

There are some possible cases when archive is corrupted: You can open archive and you can see the list of files, but when you press Extract or Test command, there are some errors: Data Error or CRC Error. When you open archive, you get message "Can not open file 'a.7z' as archive"It's possible to recover some data. Read about recovering procedure:Recover corrupted 7z archive

One way is to use the 7z.dll or 7za.dll (available from sf.net for download). The 7za.dll works via COM interfaces. It, however, doesn't use standard COM interfaces for creating objects. You can find a small example in "CPP\7zip\UI\Client7z" folder in the source code. A full example is 7-Zip itself, since 7-Zip works via this dll also. There are other applications that use 7za.dll such as WinRAR, PowerArchiver and others.

Since 7-Zip is licensed under the GNU LGPL you must follow the rules of that license. In brief, it means that any LGPL'ed code must remain licensed under the LGPL. For instance, you can change the code from 7-Zip or write a wrapper for some codefrom 7-Zip and compile it into a DLL; but, the source code of that DLL (including your modifications / additions / wrapper) must be licensed under the LGPL or GPL.Any other code in your application can be licensed as you wish.This scheme allows users and developers to change LGPL'ed code and recompilethat DLL. That is the idea of free software. Read more here: can also read about the LZMA SDK, which is available under a more liberal license.

Does anyone know the c++ file or code where this is located button/icon, so that I can search further into where this icon is located? I'm not a programmer, but a graphics editor kind of person, and am trying to build a custom theme for Windows. This icon is one of those ones that really stand out and clash against the custom Windows theme I am building.

It's comctl32.dll. There's both 32 bit and 64 bit versions so you need to find the right files to match your version of 7-Zip, also it requires permissions to alter these files. Make sure you backup original versions before changing anything. The files are located in the Windows\WinSxS folder.

The problem is that they are updated with Windows updates over time, and that there are many versions of this file so you need to search to find the right ones. Also, it will change these for other programs as well. They are universal toolbar buttons, not just icons for 7-Zip only. Other apps will use these as well, so make sure to choose ones that will work universally.

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