11Windows Icons: Full list with details, locations & images

Good qual­ity icons and images, espe­cially ones with an alpha trans­par­ency can be time con­sum­ing to make, and are often also hard to find.  One source of lots of high qual­ity icons in a range of sizes is Win­dows.  Win­dows 7 includes lots of icons which can be use­ful as the major­ity are avail­able in sizes from 16×16 up to 256×256, and come with alpha trans­par­ency.  You may have noticed that we use some on our down­loads page — they’re handy to quickly indic­ate file type. Win­dows stores most of its icons inside exe and dll files which makes them inac­cess­ible to stand­ard image manip­u­la­tion applic­a­tions like Pho­toshop.  How­ever, once they have been loc­ated they can eas­ily be extrac­ted with the free­ware util­ity IcoFX. Track­ing some of them down seems to be the trick­ier part. Below is a quick ref­er­ence for the loc­a­tions of many of the icons avail­able on Win­dows 7. I will peri­od­ic­ally add more details and any extra icon lib­rar­ies I dis­cover to this list.

Loc­a­tions of com­mon win­dows icons

Ref­er­ence list of Win­dows Icons con­tained in dll and exe icon libraries

The num­bers below each icon refer to the icon num­ber of the file, and the num­ber in brack­ets indic­ates how many vari­ants of the icon there are (there could be up to a the­or­et­ical max­imum of 20, with dif­fer­ent col­our depths and sizes.  All the icon screen­shots shown below are of 32×32 icons in their highest avail­able colour-depth.

%windir%\system32\compstui.dll (Com­mon Prop­erty Sheet User Interface)

%windir%\system32\ddores.dll (Device Cat­egory Inform­a­tion and Resources)

%windir%\system32\ieframe.dll (Inter­net Explorer)

%windir%\system32\imageres.dll (Win­dows Image Resource)

%windir%\system32\mmcndmgr.dll (Microsoft Man­age­ment Con­sole Node Manager)

%windir%\system32\moricons.dll (Win­dows NT Setup Icon Resources)

%windir%\system32\netshell.dll (Net­work Con­nec­tions Shell)

%windir%\system32\pnidui.dll (Net­work Sys­tem Icons)

%windir%\system32\shell32.dll (Win­dows Shell Common)

%windir%\system32\wmploc.dll (Win­dows Media Player Resources)

%windir%\system32\pifmgr.dll (Win­dows NT PIF Man­ager Icon Resource Library)

%windir%\system32\wpdshext.dll (Port­able Devices Shell Extension)

%windir%\system32\comres.dll (COM+ Resources)

%windir%\system32\dmdskres.dll (Disk Man­age­ment Sup­port Snap-In)

%windir%\system32\dsuiext.dll (Dir­ect­ory Ser­vice Com­mon UI)

%windir%\system32\inetcplc.dll (Inter­net Con­trol Panel)

%windir%\system32\mstsc.exe (Remote Desktop Con­nec­tion Client)

%windir%\system32\mstscax.dll (Remote Desktop Ser­vices Act­iveX Client)

%windir%\system32\setupapi.dll (Win­dows Setup API)

%windir%\system32\shdocvw.dll (Shell Doc Object and Con­trol Library)

%windir%\system32\urlmon.dll (OLE32 Exten­sion for Win32)

%windir%\system32\wiashext.dll (Ima­ging Devices Shell Folder UI)

%windir%\system32\mmres.dll (Gen­eral Audio Resources) — Thanks to Marek Podgorny (see com­ments below)

Got some thoughts of your own? Indulge yourself below by commenting! If you would like to subscribe please use the subscribe link on the menu at the top right. You can also share this with your friends by using the social links below. Cheers.