Icon Shepherd

Icon Shepherd is a tiny, unobtrusive app that lives in your computer's taskbar from where it monitors all the position changes of your desktop icons. Before we dive into detail a bit more, please note that the "Auto arrange icons" option must be disabled for the app to carry out its duties.

With that out of the way, you can start off by installing the utility via its typical wizard-based installer. Subsequently, you should be able to detect Icon Shepherd's presence in the taskbar, as mentioned before.

The app's functionality could not have been easier. Once your icons are in place, simply click the app's icon and select the "Remember icons now" option from the compact menu to create a new snapshot of your desktop.

That said, restoring the position of your desktop icons is just as straightforward. Just click the app's taskbar icon once more, select the "Restore icons" option and choose one of the available snapshots based on their creation date and time.

Despite its somewhat unremarkable looks and its overall simplicity, you are bound to discover that this tiny app works very well on later versions of Windows. It's also worth mentioning that it comes with support for native notifications.

Speaking of notifications, you will be prompted via simple notifications each time you decide to create a new snapshot or if that it detects no changes since the last snapshot.

All things considered, there's no denying the fact that Icon Shepherd is a useful utility that does its job rather well. The app's easy to install, intuitive to work with, and it's as unobtrusive as a tiny utility of this sort should be.

We did, however, find a few little niggles here and there, as the app refused to save snapshots beyond a certain point. A simple restart was necessary to get the app up and running again.