How to have file/folder icons use a relative path?

Question

On my portable hard drive I set icons for almost every organized folder. All these icons are located in an Icons folder located on the root directory of the same hard drive.

When I change the drive letter of the hard drive (well I don't, Windows does it automatically sometimes) these icons are lost. So far this hard disk drive is assigned to F:.

While it's not a problem now, it may become a problem if I upgrade my computer or get a new one and the F: drive is already taken up for something else. It's also annoying on networks where F: is mapped to a network drive.

You can change the drive letter assigned to the device when needed. See http://superuser.com/questions/81286/change-drive-letter-for-cd-drive-on-windows-7 for instructions. — Wayne Johnston, Mar 25 '13 at 23:40
http://superuser.com/questions/28115/portable-shortcuts-on-windows answers a similar question. — Wayne Johnston, Mar 25 '13 at 23:45
@WayneJohnston changing the drive letter for a CD Drive isn't all to helpful cause they aren't the problem, most of the time i have created .iso backups and run them on virtual drives however it's internal hard drives and network drives which are my problem, your second comment isn't useful either cause these are normal folders, not to mention if it wasn't because i had so many folders with icons set i would have set my Hard Drive to R (cause I'd named her Roll) and if i get more hard drives i would assign them in the same fashion — Memor-X, Mar 26 '13 at 02:48
@WayneJohnston also, i know the question in your first comment can be applied to hard drives as well however as i said in my question, windows does it automatically sometimes, i have an 80GB iPod with a smashed screen i use as a hard drive and i named her Emilita, so i have the E Directory free for her but she isn't connected all the time as she does small data transfers between other devices so when she isn't connected windows goes to change Roll from F: to E: — Memor-X, Mar 26 '13 at 02:51
i should also note that the reason why i would assign drive letters based off the hard drive's name is because the icons don't work if the drive letter is changed, if i could have the icons work all the time regardless of the drive letter then i wouldn't need to enforce it — Memor-X, Mar 26 '13 at 02:52
If you assign a relative path, how can the system know where to search for this folder? It can be anywhere. — Endoro, Mar 29 '13 at 10:08
@Endoro can't see how it wouldn't be able to find it, if I had a Music Folder on the root directory which I assigned an icon to the path would be Icons/Icon1 insted of being F:/Icons/Icon1, if it was my game project folder located in F:/RPG Maker XP/Projects/Nexis Core the path would be ../../Icons/Nexis1 instead of being F:/Icons/Nexis1 — Memor-X, Apr 01 '13 at 00:42

score 1 · Accepted Answer · edited Aug 16 '13 at 11:01

I found out where I can do it, though I've only done it on Windows XP. It'll probably work on any other version of Windows after that.

You first need to show both Hidden Files and System Protected Files. When you assign an icon to a folder a desktop.ini file in that folder, under [.ShellClassInfo] you will have a key called IconFile. Just change the path of the icon so instead of having something like F:\Icons\Anime\Code Geass\Nunnally\Nunnally1.ico or %SystemDrive%\Aura\Icons\Anime\Akiza.ico, you have a path that's relative to that folder, like putting ..\ until you get back to the root directory and then putting in the path from there. That way you're not using driver letter or system variables which may be different between computers.

How to have file/folder icons use a relative path?

1 Answers1