How to Change Icon for Libraries in Windows 7

Technorati Tags: Windows 7

In Windows 7 MS has introduced a new concept of libraries which makes managing music, pictures and documents a breeze for a typical windows user.Now with the help of this tutorial you can change the default icons of your libraries.In this tutorial we will change the icon of Documents Library.The default icon of Document library is(see screenshot below) :

We are going to change this icon to a new icon(see screenshot below):

Before you proceed please make sure that you have Show hidden files, folders, and drives option enabled in Folder Options. Now follow these steps to change a library icon:

• Open windows explorer and go to

C:\Users\(your User Name)\AppData\Roaming\Microsoft\Windows\Libraries

• Here you will see the 4 default libraries.Now right-click on the Documents library and open it with Notepad.(Libraries are normal .xml files so you can edit them using Notepad)
• In notepad, look for this line

<iconReference>path of default icon</iconReference>

• You just have to change the path of default icon to the path of your new icon.In this case our new icon is placed at C:\ and it’s filename is document.ico.So in our case that line will look like this

<iconReference>c:\document.ico</iconReference>

(see screenshot below)

• Now save the file and close notepad.The icon of Documents Library will now be changed.In the same way you can also change the icons of other Libraries that you may have.

The idea of this tutorial belongs to Bogo.