Extract Old Icons

This is admittedly a relatively trivial issue. But just based on the possibility that someone else has solved this, I'm going to ask anyway.

I have several "libraries" of icons that were accumulated over the years, going back to Windows XP, Windows 98, Windows 95, and maybe even Windows 3.1. They are mostly in .EXE files. The CHANGE ICON button in Windows 7 doesn't recognize that these files have any icons in them. I've since learned that the ability to detect 16 bit icons (which I assume many, if not all of these are) was removed from Windows at some point in the past, presumably after Windows XP, since I could access the icons in these files with XP.

Now, truth is, I'm not sure if the limitation is in displaying the icons at all, or merely detecting their presence within an EXE file. So, what I'm looking for is a (preferably free) utility that will run on Windows 7 64 bit, access and extract (converting if necessary) these old icons so that I can use them with Windows 7.

Does anyone know if such a program exists?

Brink said:

Hello RP,

You could download and install the free program Icon Viewer to have a Icons tab added to these files (ex: exe or dll files with icons in them) properties pages. You can then be able to extract and save the icons from them as .ico or .png files.



Hope this helps,
Shawn

Shawn--

Well, it looked promising. And though it sees icons in many EXE files, it does NOT see them in any of my EXE or NIL icon library files. Most of these files were created in the 1990-1995 time frame, so I'm assuming that they date back to the old Windows 3.1 days.

Heaven knows that there are thousands of icons available, and I can build new libraries. Just was hoping that there might be a utility that could access the hundreds that I already have.

Thanks very much for the effort. Though it won't do what I was looking for, it's still a handy utility.

boohbah said:

you need ICOfx a software that will turn most images into an icon file it even converts mac icons to windows icons grab it here ,drag an icon into the window and click the windows symbol and away you go.

PS.its free

Boobah--

Thanks for the suggestion. But I already tried the IcoFx program. And it won't recognize that my icon library files have any icons. My problem isn't that I need to turn image files into icons. It is that I have all these hundreds of old icons in library files, (EXE and NIL files), but neither Windows (using its Change Icon feature) nor either of the two utilities I have tried recognize that these files contain icons.

Interestingly, I have the IcoFX program on my old Windows XP machine, and when run there, it DOES recognize that the EXE library files contain icons. So an awkward, but workable approach is to take the icon library file to my XP machine, use the IcoFx program to extract the icon I want from the file, save it individually, then bring the individual ICO file back to my Windows 7 machine to use it.

Since so far, nothing seems to work on the Windows 7 system, what I may do (on a cold winter day, when I have nothing else to do), is extract ALL of the icons (one by one) using the XP machine, organize them into folders, then move them to the Windows 7 machine. However, if anyone knows of a program that will extract these old icons from library files in a 64 bit Windows 7 environment, I'd be most interested.

Use irfanview, IrfanView - Official Homepage - one of the most popular viewers worldwide, one of the more useful things on the Web.

Install it, run it, and drag the .exe onto it.

The icon will show up in the screen. If there are multiple icons, you can page thru them by clicking the DOWN arrow on the menu bar at the top of the screen.

You can export all of them using OPTIONS -> EXTRACT_ALL_FRAMES. Try different file types for best resolutions. .ICO type is a good place to start.

I just extracted about 50 icons from a windows 3.1 executable in about 1 second.

- john

You can attempt to open the EXE in Resource Hacker. Download it here >> Resource Hacker