Windows Custom Icons Sizes (NSIS)

Question

I used NSIS to create an installer for my app, which has a custom .ico icon included which is used to create the shortcut created on the desktop.

In NSIS I used this to create the icon.

CreateShortCut "$DESKTOP\AppName.lnk" "${PATH_TO_EXE}" "C:\PATH\TO\ICON\AppIcon.ico" "C:\PATH\TO\ICON\AppIcon.ico" 0

It worked fine until I used Ctrl+Mouse wheel to resize the desktop icons, which resized the icon up until a point and then defaulted to the default windows icon.

I then read here that different sizes of icons is used to achieve different things.

Example

Windows 7:

    Explorer views:
        Details / List / Small symbols: 16
        All other options: 256 (resized, if necessary)
    Right-click->Properties / choosing a new icon: 32
    Pinned to taskbar: 32
        Right-click-menu: 16
    Desktop:
        Small symbols: 32
        Medium symbols: 48
        Large symbols: 256 (resized, if necessary)
        Zooming using Ctrl+Mouse wheel: 16, 32, 48, 256

So it's clear that I need different icon sizes, so where do I place the different icons, how to I rename them and how do I add them with NSIS so that windows can automatically use the correct icon?

Answer 1

You can specify multiple icon sizes within the same .ico file, no need to create new files. My guess is that every icon editor can handle multiple sizes, otherwise have a look at this online editor .