Changing a File or Folder's Icon + Making Your Own Icons

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Sonny Stires asked if there is a way to have a picture appear on top of the folder in which it is stored to make the folder easier to identify. Yes, but there are limitations. The picture will not appear if the folder is on your Desktop, but it can be seen inside another folder if you've chosen View>Thumbnails. This is done by right-clicking the folder and going to Properties>Customize>Choose Picture>Apply>OK.

A better method for giving a folder a distinctive appearance is to right-click it and go to Properties>Customize>Change Icon. This will bring up a large collection of colorful images. Click on any you like, click OK, and then click OK again.

Normally, a file name's icon is part of the program it's associated with (such as MSWord's blue & white W). However, many of these programs offer alternative icons that can be found by right-clicking the current icon and choosing Properties>Change Icon.

Beyond these choices, it's possible to create your own personalized icons with Windows Paint. Here's how: click Start>All Programs>Accessories>Paint.

Next, click Image>Attributes and create a "canvas" of 32x32 pixels. This will produce a white icon-sized square. However, creating a design on a "canvas" this small can be difficult. Enlarge the view by clicking on View>Zoom>Large Size. Finally, click Show Grid so you can see the tiny squares that you will "paint" with various colors.

Use the drawing tools at the left and the colors at the bottom of your work area to create your design. If you want to, say, put your initials in red on a yellow background, do this: left-click on yellow and then click the "Paint Bucket" in the toolbar. Click anywhere inside the white canvas and it will fill with yellow.

Now click on red, and then click the "Straight Line" tool (shown at a 45-degree angle) to begin painting your initials. Choose the "Pencil" tool to color one pixel at a time.

If you have "straight" initials, such as FTE, the drawing will be easy. Curved letters are more challenging; but this is where you get to experiment and test your creativity.

If you want to UNDO anything, Paint allows you to Edit>Undo (Ctrl+Z) your three most recent edits.

Finally, click File>Save As, give the drawing a name, and choose BMP under "Files of Type." The drawing will normally be saved in your My Documents folder, where you can right-click it, choose Rename, and change the BMP extension to ICO (icon).

To replace a yellow folder's generic appearance with your newly-created icon, right-click it, choose Properties>Change Icon, navigate to the icon you created, and double-click it. Your homemade icon(s) will normally be saved in your My Documents folder.

A better way to convert your drawing with the BMP extension to the ICO extension is to use Irfanview (free from www.Irfanview.com). Simply open the BMP drawing in Irfanview, go to File>Save As, and choose ICO in the Save As Type field.

Your homemade icons will likely be saved by default in your My Documents folder. However, I recommend creating a special folder for this purpose, and naming it "_Icons". I create this folder inside the System32 folder, which is inside a folder named Windows.

I then place my _Icons folder inside the System32 folder because when you do Properties>Change Icon, your computer looks into this folder for alternative icons. By putting an underscore ( _ ) in front of the name Icons ( _Icons ) this folder will always be the first folder in sequence inside the System32 folder.

If you are unfamiliar with using Windows Explorer to navigate to the System32 folder, click on Start>Search>All Files & Folders and type system32 into the Name or Partial Name field. Click Search to locate the folder. When it appears, right-click it and choose Send To Desktop (Create Shortcut). Then use the Desktop Shortcut to access System32, whereupon you use File>New>Folder to create your special Icon folder.

It's also possible to convert an existing image, such as a favorite photo, to an icon. Open the JPG in Irfanview and crop a small portion of it (such as someone's face) by drawing a square around it with your left mouse-button held down. Next, click the toolbar Scissors to Cut the selection, followed by clicking the toolbar Clipboard to replace the original photo with the small cropped portion.

Next, click Image>Resize and set the Height and Width to 32 pixels each. If this distorts the image, choose 32 for the largest dimension (H or W) and leave the other as is. Finally, go to File>Save As, give the icon a name, choosing ICO (Icon) as the file type.

In addition to the Windows stock icons and the ones you create, there are hundreds of icons to be found online. (Several of the cartoons you see here — Mickey Mouse, Fred Flinstone, etc) I found online by typing FREE ICONS into Google. I also clicked on Images so that thumbnail views of many of the icons could be easily seen.

Here are a few samples, along with a simple example of making a multi-color "ABC" icon — the small image is the actual 32x32 icon, while the large image is how it looked while I was creating it in Windows Paint.