How To Change Icon Of Exe File In Windows 11

[Valda Atkeson]

Youcan use the following procedure to change an icon associated with the selected application directly from the Results pane of the Application node in the Application Virtualization Server Management Console.

We'll show you how to change icons on Windows 10, including program and folder icons. With a bit of work, you'll have an all-new interface with a unique look! While we focus on Windows 10 here, these tips largely work the same on Windows 11.

Flaticon is a great resource for all your Windows icon needs. The site contains millions of high-quality icons arranged in thousands of convenient packs. You can grab everything in a pack at once, or download single icons.

The site offers downloads in several formats. We recommend downloading them in PNG for easy conversion to the ICO format. Keep all the raw downloads in a folder called PNG Icons or similar.

ConvertICO offers an easy way to do this. You can upload up to 50 PNG images at once to convert them into the ICO format. If you prefer, you can also enter the URL of an image you want to convert, cutting out the middle step of downloading the PNG.

Windows 10 makes it easy to change the program icon for a shortcut, but not the main executable. Thus, you should make a desktop shortcut for the app icon you want to change, if you don't have one already.

To do this, search for an app in the Start menu, then right-click its name and choose Open file location. In the resulting folder, right-click the program name and choose Send to > Desktop (create shortcut).

Now you can modify the new shortcut on your desktop. Right-click it and choose Properties to open a new window. Here, switch to the Shortcut tab and click the Change Icon button at the bottom.

Want to customize the icons on your Taskbar too? The easiest way to do this is to follow the steps above to create custom desktop icons. After that, simply right-click a shortcut and choose Pin to Taskbar.

If you'd rather, you can customize an icon already pinned to your Taskbar. While holding Shift, right-click the app icon and choose Properties. From here, you can follow the same steps as above to set a new icon.

On the resulting window, switch to the Customize tab. Select the Change Icon button at the bottom to select a new icon from your computer. Windows includes many default icons for this, but most of them are old-school and ugly. Hit Browse to locate your custom icons instead.

Now, double-click the 3 string you just made. In the Value data field, enter the location of your folder icon in quotes. An easy way to do this is by holding Shift while right-clicking your ICO file, then selecting the Copy as path option. It should look something like this:

Using this, you can set up separate icons to distinguish file types, even if they open in the same program. You might want to make it easier to highlight JPG and PNG files at a glance, or spot old DOC Word files not using the newer DOCX format, for instance.

To start, create a new folder somewhere you can keep permanently. Name it Spaces or something similar. Inside this folder, right-click again and choose New > Text document. Double-click the file to open it.

Windows has blank icons built-in. But in our testing, these can appear as black squares on your Taskbar instead of transparent boxes, which is no good. This means you'll need to quickly make your own "blank" icon.

However, if you leave it like this, you'll run into the same black block problem. Thus, you need to take the Pencil tool, zoom in, and use it to draw a single pixel in a corner of the image. This will effectively be invisible when it sits on your Taskbar.

Once this is done, you'll need to add one more element in order to add these shortcuts to your Taskbar. In the Shortcut tab of each BAT file, enter explorer in front of everything in the Target box. Make sure there's a space before the opening quotes.

Now you can right-click all your Space files and choose Pin to taskbar. They'll appear as blank icons, allowing you to drag them wherever you like and group your other icons.

Just want to adjust the size of Windows 10 icons on your desktop? That's an easy fix. On the desktop, you can right-click any empty space and choose View to select Small icons, Medium icons, or Large icons.

If you don't see any icons on your desktop, chances are that you've hidden them all. Getting them back takes just a few clicks. Right-click anywhere on your desktop, then select View > Show desktop icons if it's not already checked. With this enabled, you should see your desktop icons with no problem.

Finally, if you're missing the default Windows 10 system icons, you'll need to restore them in another menu. Go to Settings > Personalization > Themes and on the right side of the window, select Desktop icon settings.

Now you know how to change nearly every icon on your Windows system. Whether you want to completely overhaul everything or just want to change a few shortcut icons, you have the tools to personalize your computer in a fun way.

In Win7, one could give a desktop shortcut to a URL (website) any image one wanted, but that seems not to be the case in Win10. It forces the same image, in this instance the Firefox icon, for all URL shortcuts. Can this be changed? Thank you.

I tried this on Win10. Works. Created a Facebook shortcut, pasting in the URL. Got the standard browser icon first. Then I did a right click on the icon, checked "Properties". Looked for "Change icon". The system has icons. OR, you can go to a web site and create your own from anything. This will take items and turn them into .ico formats so you can use anything you wish to make a suitable icon instead of boring stuff. Save your icons in a selected folder for handy reference. The site allows an upload of your pic, then download to your folder. Simple. I've used this many times without difficulty. Running latest version of Win10 (2004).

If you want the icon to be from the site you are linking to then click on the Firefox (or whatever browser you have) to the right and select "Internet Browser" instead.Firefox will still be your default browser but windows will handle the link differently now.

If you have the website pulled up, click on the three dots in the upper righthand corner of the page, click on "More Tools" and one of the choices will be "Create Shortcut." I found this to work to change my desktop icons to match the actual website and not the browser (Chrome) icon.

When you save the file as HTML then the icon of the shortcut is the icon of your default browser. When you pin a page to your taskbar, I think the icon is the favicon of the website. So you can open the code of the site and change the icon there.

When you create a shortcut with New -> Shortcut from the context menu. Then you get an link-file (Internet shortcut .url). That icon you can change: Open the properties (context menu) and go to the tab Web Document and then click on the Button Change Icon ... with Browse you can use every icon / exe you want to show the icon.

I did the following to overcome this problem:I saved all the url files in one folder, and for each url file I made a shortcut on my desktop. And from a shortcut, the icon can be changed easily from the properties dialog.Advantage: I have all url files neatly stored in one folder, and I have the icons I want on my desktop.

The solution above may not work as many instances of my app can be installed in different pathes (so you end up with the same exe file name but different icons!), is this registry key poorly designed or am I missing something?

You should be able to identify where the shortcut is (ie, get KnownFolders and work from there. UserAppData should be the one), and then using P/Invoke (IShellLink), you can alter the icon that the shortcut is setup to use. The machine might need a reboot for this to take effect, but it should work.

If you hold down Shift while right-clicking on the pinned application, and select Properties, you can see the Change Icon button for the shortcut. This is basically what you need to emulate with code.

If you create an application and put the icon property of the main window, that icon will appear in the taskbar also. But, if you pin-it to the taskbar, that icon dissapear. Am I right? If so, go to the project properties and in the application tab, put the icon that you want for the exe. Now, you will see that icon in the taskbar when pinned.

As far as I can tell, for some reason you can't change the icon for a program that's already pinned to the taskbar. To do it, just unpin the program, locate it in the start menu, right click - properties - change icon. then re-pin it to the taskbar, and it will have the new icon!

I can't test this right now unfortunately, but perhaps just creating a regular, good old shortcut might solve the problem? Create a shortcut to the app, change the icon, then pin the shortcut instead of the app itself?

Right click on the pinned icon, in the popup you see the programs title, there right click again and go to properties. There you are able to change the icon by clicking on the button "change icon". For me it needed a reboot to finish the changes.

Drop a folder into the taskbar ( which creates a shortcut to images ). Navigate to the directory where that shortcut was placed, right click on the shortcut and select "properties" to change the target. Select the "general" tab to change the name of the shortcut. The shortcut was placed here:

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