How To Make Windows 10 Icons Look Like Windows 8 Icons

One of the most discussed features of Windows 10 is its icons. But people sure don’t talk about them in a positive way, and they’re constantly demanding a change from Microsoft. If you want to use different icons, but can’t wait for Microsoft to officially introduce them, with a couple of tricks, you can get your old Windows 8 icons back.

How to bring Windows 8 icons back to Windows 10

To change your icons to Windows 8 style, you’ll first have to download Windows 8 icons pack, provided by WinAero. Extract the .rar folder to the location on your computer where you want to store your Windows 8 icons. After you download the icons, we can get to work.

Step 1: Replace Windows 10 Desktop icons with Windows 8 Desktop icons

1. Right-click anywhere on the Desktop and click on Personalize from the context menu
2. When the Personalization window opens, click Change desktop icons from on the left pane
3. In Desktop Icon Settings, change all the icons you want to the ones you previously downloaded

Step 2: Replace Windows 10 folder icons with Windows 8 folder icons

You can get the old folder icons simply by performing a couple of tasks in the Registry Editor. Here’s what you should do:

1. Go to Search, type regedit, and open Registry Editor
2. Go to the following Registry key:
   • HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINESOFTWAREMicrosoftWindowsCurrentVersionExplorer
3. Create a new subkey and name it Shell Icons (but there’s a possibility that you already have this key in your Registry)
4. Create new string values named 3 and 4. Set the value data of both values to the following value:
   • C:IconsFolder.ico
5. Now create the c:Icons folder and move the Folder.ico file that you extracted from the ZIP archive there
6. Restart the computer.

• RELATED: Full Fix: Cannot Delete Files, Folders or Icons in Windows 10, 8.1 and 7

Step 3: Replace Windows 10 icons for user profile with Windows 8 icons

Here is how you can change icons for folders in your user profile:

1. Open the “Contacts” folder ( which is probably on this address: C:UsersYour user nameContacts)
2. In the address bar of File Explorer add desktop.ini to the end of the current folder path and press Enter (For example, C:UsersYour user nameContactsdesktop.ini)
3. The Notepad document will be opened. Find the line starting with “IconResource” and add a semicolon before the IconResource word
4. Add a new line to the end of the file (For example, IconResource=C:UsersWinaeroDesktopIcon4sContacts.ico)
5. Save the file and close Notepad
6. Close your User Profile, and open it again to see the changes

Step 4: Fix large icons problem

You might have a problem with large icons in your File Explorer. To resolve this issue, do the following:

1. Press Win + R on the keyboard
2. Type the following in the Run box and press Enter:
   • SystemPropertiesAdvanced
3. Click Settings in the Performance group
4. Untick Show thumbnails instead of icons
5. Press Apply

That would be all, you’ll now have your old icons from Windows 8 in Windows 10, and you won’t have to look at ‘ugly’ Windows 10’s icons all the time.

Speaking of icons, did you now that you can customize your PC icons according to your very own preferences? There are plenty of tools that allow you to design your own icons. If you’re interested, you can read more about these tools in this guide.

In case you’re experiencing any issues with your Windows icons, here are three guides that you can use to fix them in no time:

Windows 10 — How to make Task Bar Icons larger?

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Thank you for posting your query on Microsoft Community.

I appreciate your interest in Windows 10.

Are you using any third party program to customize or personalize desktop icons?

If you have upgraded to Windows 10 recently and you have third party programs installed to customize desktop, I would suggest you to uninstall them as they would create conflicts with Windows.

Follow the below link as reference and check if it helps:

How to use the taskbar

Please let us know if you need further assistance.

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I am not using third party programs to customize my computer.

And that link that you sent does not indicate a way in which I can make the taskbar icons any bigger.

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Alright folks, you have to go to Settings first, then go to Display, then and if you got multiply displays YOU select the display you want that has your TASK BAR on it. Me, 3 displays and mines to the left top!

Next you go and move the slider to the right that’s asking you «Change the size of text, apps, and others items» and move that bar to the right and this will increase your ICON SIZE. It happens after you press «Apply». Also, choices are 125%, 150%, etc.

NOTE; You may have to make your Task Bar larger, i.e. increase how tall it is by using your arrows to move it to make it taller!

Mine looks kind of discombobulated but I’m happy with it. I actually have two (2) rows now!

How to create a high quality icon for my Windows application?

If you are running Windows with a higher DPI setting you will notice that most application icons on the desktop look terrible. Even some high profile application icons such as Google Chrome look terrible while Firefox, Skype and MS Office icons look sharp:

I suspect that most icons look blurry because a lower resolution icon is scaled up rather than using a higher resolution icon.

I want to give my application a high quality icon and can’t seem to convince Windows to use the higher resolution icon. I have created a multi-resolution icon with the icon editor IcoFX. The icon is provided in 16×16, 24×24, 32×32,48×48, 128×128 and 256×256 (!) (all in 32 bit including alpha channel) yet Windows seems to use the 48×48 version of the icon on the desktop and scale it up which looks terrible. (I am using Windows 7 — 64 bit — the icon is placed by means of setting up a shortcut in the msi (created via Visual Studio 2008 Setup Project) and pointing it to the .ico file that contains the multi-resolution icon)

I have tried removing the 128×128 icon but to no avail. Interestingly in Windows Explorer the icon looks great even when using the Extra Large Icon setting. How can I create a high quality desktop icon that looks great on higher DPI settings on Windows?

EDIT: I tested removing the 128×128 option, then both the 48×48 and 128×128 option and tried Axialis IconWorkshop to create the icon — nothing worked.

EDIT: After much trial and error I think the real problem here is the Visual Studio 2008 Setup Project — manually setting up a link to my executable correctly uses the high resolution icon, however the link that is created by the setup doesn’t use the correct icon. When setting the icon for the link in the editor it only gives me one option (index 0) which seems to be the 48×48 icon. I have tried manually adjusting the IconIndex in the .vdproj but had no luck.

Icons for Windows apps

Icons provide a visual shorthand for an action, concept, or product. By compressing meaning into a symbolic image, icons can cross language barriers and help conserve an extremely valuable resource: screen space.

Icons can appear in apps—and outside them:

Icons inside the app

Inside your app, you use icons to represent an action, such as copying text or navigating to the settings page.

Icons outside the app

Outside your app, Windows uses an icon to represent your app in the start menu and in the taskbar. If the user chooses to pin your app to the start menu, your app’s start tile can feature your app’s icon. Your app’s icon appears in the title bar and you can choose to create a splash screen with your app’s logo.

This article describes icons within your app. To learn about icons outside your app (app icons), see the app and tile icons article.

When to use icons

Icons can save space, but when should you use them?

Use an icon for actions, like cut, copy, paste, and save, or for navigation items in a navigation menu.

Use an icon if one already exists for the concept you want to represent. (To see whether an icon exists, check the Segoe icon list.)

Use an icon if it’s easy for the user to understand what the icon means and it’s simple enough to be clear at small sizes.

Don’t use an icon if its meaning isn’t clear, or if making it clear requires a complex shape.

Using the right type of icon

There are many ways to create an icon. You can use a symbol font like Segoe MDL2 Assets. You could create your own vector-based image. You can even use a bitmap image, although we don’t recommend it. Here’s a summary of the different ways you can add an icon to your app.

Use a predefined icon.

Microsoft provides over 1000 icons in the form of the Segoe MDL2 Assets font. It might not be intuitive to get an icon from a font, but our font display technology means these icons will look crisp and sharp on any display, at any resolution, and at any size. For instructions, see Segoe MDL2 icons.

Use a font.

You don’t have to use the Segoe MDL2 Assets font—you can use any font the user has installed on their system, such as Wingdings or Webdings.

Use a Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) file.

SVG resources are ideal for icons, because they always look sharp at any size or resolution. Most drawing applications can export to SVG. For instructions, see SVGImageSource.

Use Geometry objects.

Like SVG files, geometries are a vector-based resource, so they always look sharp. However, creating a geometry is complicated because you have to individually specify each point and curve. It’s really only a good choice if you need to modify the icon while your app is running (to animate it, for example). For instructions, see Move and draw commands for geometries.

You can also use a bitmap image, such as PNG, GIF, or JPEG, although we don’t recommend it.

Bitmap images are created at a specific size, so they have to be scaled up or down depending on how large you want the icon to be and the resolution of the screen. When the image is scaled down (shrunk), it can appear blurry; when it’s scaled up, it can appear blocky and pixelated. If you have to use a bitmap image we recommend using a PNG or GIF over a JPEG.

Make the icon do something

Once you have an icon, the next step is to make it do something by associating it with command or a navigation action. The best way to do this is to add the icon to a button or a command bar.

Create an icon button

You can put an icon in a standard button. Since you can use buttons in a wider variet of places, this gives you a little more flexibility for where your action icon appears.

The are a few ways to add an icon to a button:

Step 1
Set the button’s font family to Segoe MDL2 Assets and its content property to the unicode value of the glyph you want to use:

Step 2
You can use one of the icon element objects: BitmapIcon, FontIcon, PathIcon, or SymbolIcon. This gives you more types of icons to choose from, and enables you to combine icons and other types of content, such as text, if you want:

Create a series of icons in a command bar

When you have a series of commands that go together, such as cut/copy/paste or a set of drawing commands for a photo-editing program, put them together in a command bar. A command bar takes one or more app bar buttons or app bar toggle buttons, each of which represents an action. Each button has an Icon property you use to control which icon it displays. There are a variety of ways to specify the icon.

The easiest way is to use the list of predefined icons we provide—simply specify the icon name, such as «Back» or «Stop», and the system will draw it:

For the complete list of icon names, see the Symbol enumeration.

There are other ways to provide icons for a button in a command bar:

• FontIcon — the icon is based on a glyph from the specified font family.
• BitmapIcon — the icon is based on a bitmap image file with the specified Uri.
• PathIcon — the icon is based on Path data.

To learn more about command bars, see the command bar article.