Icon Explorer is a free and portable tool which makes it easy to locate icons on a Windows system, then save them as ICO or BMP files. For a simple example of how the program works, just launch it and browse to your \Windows\System32 (or equivalent) folder. There will be a lengthy pause while Icon Explorer works – sometimes a minute or more but be patient, the program is accessing every file in the folder to detail the icons it contains, and this understandably takes a while.
Once it’s finished, though, you’ll see a list of every file with icons, the number of embedded icons and their overall size in kilobytes. And simply clicking on a particular file will reveal a simple thumbnail display of all the icons it contains. If you’d like a closer look, just clicking on a particular thumbnail shows you all the resolutions it contains in the preview pane, and right-clicking one of these provides the option to export it in ICO or BMP format.
[advt]One problem which quickly becomes apparent is there’s no way to filter the icons by size. If you’re only interested in high-res 256×256 icons, say, there’s no indication of where they are; you must first select individual files, then click icons one at a time to view their preview (a tedious business when some Windows files, for instance, may contain more than 100 embedded icons).
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