Where are ms paint icons stored?

In which file (.dll, .exe or similar) are icons (such as the pen or the eraser ) stored? To be clear, I mean the new, modern icons - not the ones from earlier versions of windows.

I didn't have any luck in finding them in either mspaint.exe, imageres.dll or shel32.dll (using IconsExtract), so I figured that maybe someone knows where they are.

A general solution for finding icons for any application would also be appreciated.

1 Answer

In earlier Windows 10 versions, the resources are managed in MUI files in System32 folder. So, the MSPaint icons can be found in this:

C:\Windows\System32\en-US\mspaint.exe.mui

From Windows 10 version 1903 aka. May 2019 Update, those resources are moved to MUN files in SystemResources folder. So, the MSPaint icons can be found in this:

C:\Windows\SystemResources\mspaint.exe.mun

The en-US is the default system language. It will vary if system language isdifferent. Open the file in any resource editing tool, for example Resource Hackeror it's alternatives to view the resources. The required icons are stored in image folder.

The easiest way is to extract those icons from that mspaint.exe.mun file with7ZIP. Then rename every file with ICO extension.