There are many reasons when you would want to extract the icons from inside the binary files such as EXE, DLL and OCX files. For example, computer programmers have to sometime extract these icons from EXE files when they are given the project of updating a program without complete source-code available. Similarly, graphics designers can take these icons and design new versions of icons based on them. For all these tasks, you have to first enumerate and extract the icons from the binary files. A freeware tool called ‘Icons from File’ can be used to pull these icons from within the executable program files.
‘Icons from File’ has a simple user interface that makes it easy for you to extract the icons. You can open the binary files by clicking on the open button in the toolbar and selecting one of the binary files (EXE, OCX or DLL). These files usually are located inside the Windows folder (C:\Windows) or in the program files folder (C:\Program Files\). For example, you can select the Firefox executable “Firefox.exe” for this. As soon as the binary files are selected, all the icons embedded inside it are displayed in its window.
In order to extract the icons, you can click on the “Save” icon in the toolbar. This will give you many options like save the selected icons only, save all of them in one image file or save them individually in different file formats such as ICON, BMP, JPEG, GIF, PNG, HTML, PDF etc.
It comes with a feature that lets you find all the files that have icons inside them. This feature is useful if you don’t know the binary files that contain the icon files. In order to use this feature, you can click on the the button labeled “Find files with icons inside” and then navigate to the folder where you are searching for icons.
Conclusion: Icons from File gives an easy way to extract the icons from all the popular binary files. It supports EXE, DLL and OCX files. It can extract the icons in form of image files, ico files, PDF, and others.
You can download Icons from File tool from https://www.vlsoftware.net/icons-from-file/index.html.