You can easily create your own, personalised, folder icons from just about any image. Having distinct icons displayed on your Windows folders makes them easy to find and obvious as to the contents. It’s a more visual way of organising folders.
Both Windows 10 and Windows 11 have their own built in icons that you can use for a quick and easy way of customising folders, but these are old and very limited. How To Change File And Folder Icons In Windows.
Creating your own folder icons is much more personal and, in my opinion, more satisfying.
Make Your Own Windows Icons
To make a Windows folder icon from an image, you’re going to need some sort of a picture. The image can be just about anything you like, photos, drawings, sketches etc. Anything that’s in either the PNG, JPEG, GIF or BMP formats will be fine.
Windows icons have to be in the .ico file format. So what you’ll do is to upload your image, convert it to .ico and then download it back to your PC. There are plenty of free online converters that you can use to convert your file and they all work pretty much the same.
Head to https://redketchup.io/icon-converter and when you’re there click the Browse button to upload the picture you want to use as a folder icon on your computer.
Navigate to and select the image that you’d like to use.
When the picture has uploaded, scroll down a little to the Crop Image section of the page.
Crop The Image
Windows icons are square. So your image also needs to be square. The website will super impose a square crop over your original image.
You can use the grab handles at the sides and corners to resize the image and move the focal point by dragging the crop square. All the areas of the picture overlayed in black will be discarded when the image is converted to an ICO file.
Icon Sizes And Round Corners
Once you’ve got the cropping sorted out scroll down to the Configure Icon section.
For Windows icons make sure that all the sizes are selected. Ico files are layered with all the different sizes, so you’ll only download a single ico file that contains all the sizes. That’s important because it allows Windows to choose the correct size icon for your display settings.
Rounded corners are very popular at the moment, particularly in Windows 11. Move the slider to increase or decrease the amount of corner rounding, anything from square to completely round.
ICO File Format
After setting the corner rounding options, scroll down a little more and check the file name. You’ll notice that it’s the same as the file that you uploaded except that it now has the .ico file extension at the end.
You can leave the filename as it is if you want, or change it to something else by clicking the box and then typing in the required name. Remember to add the .ico extension at the end. For example Holidays Folder.ico
Happy with the file name, click the Download button. You’ll see a preview of the icon. Click Download in the top left corner of the preview.
To use your newly created icon, right click on the folder and then left click Properties.
Select the Customise tab and then click the Change Icon button.
Navigate to where you saved the downloaded ICO file to, select it and click OK.
Summary.
If you don’t have an image file you can always grab a picture from free sites such as Pixabay. Or use one of the many free icon repository websites How To Download Custom Folder Icons
