How do I restore Icons to display as icons rather than thumbnails?

[jojobear99]

I have an unusual problem. I was working on making some ugly filetype icons
prettier, and I changed the default editor for .ico (icon) files by right
clicking on a file and selecting an icon editor application, as the default
viewer can't even display vista icons (somehow ironic!). That worked okay
except it caused an odd side effect--now icons appear in windows explorer in
thumbnail view (just like if they were a jpg or png) on a random view from
the icon rather than displaying the best sized icon view. This means at
"small icons" it doesn't even show the icon's image, just a generic file
icon. Eeek, maybe this wasn't such a good idea after all! But now I can't
figure out how to restore icons to displaying in their native view in
explorer! Any help on how to undo this would be much appreciated!

 

[Andre Da Costa[ActiveWin]]

In the explorer shell, there is a command on the command bar called 'Views'
click it or click the pop out arrow beside and move the slider until the
desired effect appears.

 

[jojobear99]

perhaps I should clarify! If I set the icon size to medium icons or large
icons, instead of seeing the 255x256 pixel image resized to the current view
size, I see one somewhat random but consistent image from the icon (sometimes
a little dinky one) with a border around it like it was a png. Icon images
should not have a border around them at all. If I put it on small icons view
I should see the icon 16x16 image, but instead I see some sort of default
icon image. This ONLY applies to the *.ico filetype, all other filetypes are
working just as expected. I am trying to fix an unexpected side-effect of
reassociating the default program to edit *.ico files with. Sorry if I wasn't
clear about this before!

 

[jojobear99]

You are correct that there is not an option of "thumbnails" though there is a
slider to adjust the size of the thumbnails. The problem is windows is
picking the wrong image from the icon file (type is *.ico) to make the
thumbnail out of (and adding a border that icons don't normally have and
didn't have until this change), and icons should use the 16x16 image (just
like an exe would) when in small icons view... I'm not talking about general
thumbnails...only the display of the type of image of .ico files which is a
special type programmers often use for creating the icons for executables!
Sorry if I was unclear on this before!

 

[jojobear99]

No matter where I put the slider files of type *.ico do not do the right
thing...they appear to be associated somehow to the image handler rather than
the icon handler. Other file types there is no problem, the problem is
specific to this file extension/file type.

 

[Andre Da Costa[ActiveWin]]

Well, I would just restore them back to there defaults then since the
changes you made has some caused some problems.

 

[jojobear99]

How would I do that? I already tried using the open with (and always use this
program) to change it back to using the windows app as the default open with
app, but that didn't *restore* the previous associations, it left it broken.

 

[Ramesh, MS-MVP]

Hi,

Try running the .ico file association fix from here:
http://www.winhelponline.com/articles/105/1/File-association-fixes-for-Windows-Vista.html

--
Regards,

Ramesh Srinivasan, Microsoft MVP [Windows Shell/User]
Windows® Troubleshooting http://www.winhelponline.com


I have an unusual problem. I was working on making some ugly filetype icons
prettier, and I changed the default editor for .ico (icon) files by right
clicking on a file and selecting an icon editor application, as the default
viewer can't even display vista icons (somehow ironic!). That worked okay
except it caused an odd side effect--now icons appear in windows explorer in
thumbnail view (just like if they were a jpg or png) on a random view from
the icon rather than displaying the best sized icon view. This means at
"small icons" it doesn't even show the icon's image, just a generic file
icon. Eeek, maybe this wasn't such a good idea after all! But now I can't
figure out how to restore icons to displaying in their native view in
explorer! Any help on how to undo this would be much appreciated!

 

[jojobear99]

Rajinsback,
This seemed to be helpful advice, when I disable thumbnail previews, icons
display normally, so that's halfway to a solution. However, then jpegs and
gifs and whatnot do not display thumbnail previews. Is there a way (even
manually through regedit) to disable "thumbnail preview" only for the icon
file type while still leaving it enabled for other file types?
Thank you for your help!

 

[jojobear99]

Thank you, running the reg file at that website fixed the 16x16 icon views
back to showing the icon.

 

[Ramesh, MS-MVP]

You're welcome!

--
Regards,

Ramesh Srinivasan, Microsoft MVP [Windows Shell/User]
Windows® Troubleshooting http://www.winhelponline.com


Thank you, running the reg file at that website fixed the 16x16 icon views
back to showing the icon.