Explore, Select and Extract

Desktop customization can be a nice pastime and is even felt as a necessity when the old items displayed onto your computer's screen become boring. If new wallpapers and screensavers are easy to find and replace, the default icons for your files and folders are a bit more tricky to locate (online or offline), select and change. There's always the alternative of using a dedicated software that can help you manually craft your own icons, but this can be quite a time-consuming activity and unless you're really devoted to this action, you're better off using existing packs ready-made.

First of all, you need to discover a library that has the icons you like and use them to replace the system defaults. This is not at all easy to accomplish because if you take any collection from the Internet, there will always be some items that don't fully satisfy you, or don't match the overall style you thought of. Secondly, if you want to use different icons for the installed applications you use most often or folders you visit more frequently, you'll have to individually select them by browsing through dozens of collections. Once these steps are successful, you can get to the fun part of assigning different icons to all your directories and files.

Withal, there is an alternative solution that somewhat combines the icon creation and the above mentioned stages. It consists of extracting icons contained by existing EXE or DLL files as well as ICO and ICL libraries. This means you have the possibility to create your personal collections by choosing only the items you like and consider are worth keeping. To do that, you need a utility that can browse your PC and scan for the specific file types, show and allow you to pull out and retain the icons you like to a library of your own. Enter Icon Explorer, a freeware tool that seems cut out precisely for that, as it was designed to search, explore and extract the icons you need, then store them into an offline library.

The software doesn't have to be installed on your hard disk as all you need to do is unpack the ZIP archive and run the executable. You'll find yourself in front of a simple explorer-like interface, with no fancy buttons, eye catching skins or effects. The emphasis is obviously on practicality and speed of operation to help you produce an original iconset that can be later used to help customize the overall looks of your computer.

Icon Explorer offers you two browsing modes: one is obviously dedicated to icons and the other is made for graphical files, so you'll be able to use it as a picture viewer too. The range of supported file types number in the dozens and it is a big plus for this otherwise supplementary feature. Apart from common picture formats, like BMP, JPEG, GIF or PNG, this software recognizes and displays particular ones for applications such as Turevision, Autodesk, Kodak Photo-CD or Dr. Halo, totaling no less than 37 different types. The preview window for the digital images is vertically resizable, but you need to be careful because if you increase it too much while the application is maximized, when you restore the utility to a smaller size the viewer will keep its outsized aspect.

When going after the icons you want to add to the personal library, you'll have some choices to make in order to refine and narrow the search from a special panel conveniently placed under the explorer tab. First off there's the selection of a specific file mask that you want to find and there are four available variants, namely the ones nominated a few paragraphs above. Then, you can decide to activate one of the other options that will further restrain the lookup. They refer to the inclusion of subfolders and exclusion of dupes (duplicate files), while a third check box will let you clear the previously made selection.

Once the icons are displayed, all you need to do is click on the ones you want to keep and they will appear on the left tab, where the library you want to create is. You can however save them directly from the icon browser window by right-clicking any of them and choosing the action you want to perform. There are two things you can do in this case: add the selected item or all those displayed to the library or save them to ICO files. Insofar as the icons added to the newly created collection are concerned, you can also keep each of them in bitmap (BMP) format and select the background color you like for every selected item.

Icon Explorer can help you create personal iconsets but you can also open existing ones if they are in ICL format. Also helpful are the functions accessible from the Edit menu that enable you to directly add files or icons to the library and remove the unwanted ones. This is done virtually instantaneously and it's a pretty good indicator for the processing speed of this utility that is also quite moderate in terms of system resource usage.

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