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#140: How can I define a custom icon for some folder?

In MS Windows you can define any custom icon for desired folder instead default icon (yellow folder picture). Also you can define own string description which will be displayed in Explorer application.

To do it is very easy task:
1. you must create a desktop.ini file with special structure:
[.ShellClassInfo]
IconFile=yourFileWithIcon.ico
IconIndex=0
InfoTip=your description text

2. you must set a System flag to attributes of your folder

A first part is solved in Delphi in a few lines of code:

with TINIFile.Create(yourFolderName + '\desktop.ini') do
  try
    WriteString('.ShellClassInfo', 'IconFile', 'yourFileWithIco.ico');
    WriteString('.ShellClassInfo', 'IconIndex', '0'); //icon index
    WriteString('.ShellClassInfo', 'InfoTip', 'your description text');
    {flush a buffered INI-file to disk}
    UpdateFile; 
  finally
    Free
  end;

A second (to set a system attribute) is not hard too:
SetFileAttributes(PChar(yourFolderName), FILE_ATTRIBUTE_SYSTEM);

Published: May 20, 2002

See also

	dBase Viewer
	Excel Web-stream
	SMImport suite
	ABA Picture Convert
	Clarion to Text converter
	DBISAM Password Recovery
	Database Information Manager
	Viewer for MS Outlook Messages
	Metafile Convert
	DBLoad

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