Thumbico is a combination of an icon extraction and viewing tool, with a thumbnail viewer and creator.

The program is tiny, a 28KB download, and unsurprisingly there’s no installation required– just unzip and run Thumbico.exe.

On launch the program displays a small window. Drag and drop any executable and Thumbico extracts and displays its icon.

You can also drag and drop an image to view its thumbnail, or any other document to see the icon of the associated application. Choose a PDF document, for instance, and you’ll see the icon of your PDF viewer.

There are toolbar and menu options to increase or decrease the image size, or set a standard size (16×16, 32×32, 64×64 and so on, up to 512×512).

Drag and drop any executable to see its icon

You’re able to rotate and flip the image, or change the background colour.

A Save option enables saving the icon or thumbnail as a PNG, BMP, GIF or JPEG.

Thumbico is a very basic program which can’t show you all the icons in a file, and doesn’t support batch processing. But it’s fine for saving the occasional program icon, or making a quick thumbnail. And as a single EXE under 60KB in size, there’s no real penalty in keeping a copy around. Take a look.

Thumbico is available for Windows XP and later.