How To Extract And Save Icons From EXE Or DLL Using Icon Viewer

Usually icons of any program are contained in EXE or DLL files. Say you want to extract Windows 7 Icons and change Windows XP icons to these new ones. For this you need an icon extraction tool such as IconViewer. Here is how you can extract icons from any EXE or DLL file using IconViewer free program to extract icons.

Download and install IconViewer (download link at bottom). Don’t be surprised if you don’t find any Start Menu or desktop icon of this program after installation. IconViewer is a shell extension, which integrates into the Properties menu of an EXE or DLL file.

1. Right click on the EXE or DLL (for e.g shell32.dll in C:\Windows\System32 contains Windows icons) and select ‘Properties’.

2. Go the newly added Icons tab.

3. Select any icon from the list of icons and then select the size (16x16px, 32×32 px, 48x48px, 128x128px, 256x256px, etc). You can preview the icon before you go ahead and save it by clicking the ‘Save As..’ button.

4. Give a name to the icon file and save it to the desired location.

All icons are saved in .ICO format. You may want to convert ICO to JPG, GIF, PNG, or BMP format.

Icon Viewer Options

You can modify Icon Viewer’s options by clicking on the settings icon in the ‘Icons’ tab of the Properties menu after right clicking on the EXE or DLL file.

In the IconViewer options, you can change the background color of the extracted icons while saving in BMP format (which does not support transparency), change the list order of the images, enable or disable IconViewer for multiple file selection, and enable or disable grouping of icons by file.

Download IconViewer

IconViewer works with Windows 7, Windows Vista, and Windows XP. It is available for both 32bit and 64bit systems.