32Windows 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.

IcoFX can be used to extract the images.  It sup­ports all icon sizes, from 16×16 up to 256×256.  It sup­ports the full range of col­our depths — 8bit, 16bit and 32bit.  It also sup­ports alpha trans­par­ency.  Icons can be extrac­ted to bmp, jpg, png, gif and jp2.  IcoFX 2 is free­ware.  More details are avail­able on the [int­link id=“741” type=“page”]downloads[/intlink] page.

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\inetcpl.cpl (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)