NIconView

It’s a common thing nowadays to easily recognize a file by its icon, while most executables are fitted with unique creations to more or less represent the purpose. Although you can easily view them in File Explorer, even in large size, there are various alternatives such as NIconView which are dedicated to displaying icons.

On the bright side of things, the application comes in a lightweight package, letting you take it from the spin the moment download is done, because there’s no setup involved. It makes it easy to have it stored and carried around on a thumb drive, but the target computer needs to be equipped with .NET Framework, because it’s a mandatory requirement.

All the application has to offer narrows down to several navigation panels wrapped around a classic window frame. On the one hand, there’s a tree list which neatly displays folders and archives for you to go through, while content is shown in a file viewer, but only by name and extension.

The purpose is to make it easy to view all icons contained inside a file. The preview section isn’t exceptionally large, but it does clearly show the selection. Note, however, that it doesn’t display thumbnails, and is only capable of showing icons which are embedded into files.

Unfortunately, the application is pretty straightforward, and this isn’t really an advantage here. For instance, you’re not able to look up items of interest, or apply filters. Moreover, displayed icons can’t be extracted, which is a major disappointment.

Taking everything into consideration, we can state that NIconView is, overall, a poor representation of a file explorer. Although navigation is pretty comfortable, the lack of an option to extract icons from the display area is rather against the purpose, making you look for alternatives from the first few moments of launch.