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YellowRed
YellowRed

Posted on • Originally published at github.com

I built a free tool that turns your Windows game shortcuts into a cover-art shelf

#opensource #powershell #windows #showdev

I keep a folder of game shortcuts on Windows. Over time it filled up with plain, mismatched icons — some generic, some low-res, some just the default launcher icon. It bugged me every time I opened it. There was no easy way in Windows to give every shortcut a clean, matching piece of cover art in one go.

So I built Game Icons Studio.

What it does

You point it at a folder of game shortcuts. It then:

  1. Scans every shortcut and matches it to the right game on SteamGridDB.
  2. Downloads square cover art (sorted by community score).
  3. Builds proper multi-size Windows .ico files so icons look crisp at every size.
  4. Applies them to your shortcuts and refreshes Explorer.

You review every cover before anything is applied, and you can swap the ones you don't like or accept all of them automatically.

A few design decisions

It runs 100% locally. Your files and your SteamGridDB API key never leave your PC. The only network call is to SteamGridDB to fetch artwork.

No Electron, no install. It's written in PowerShell, and the UI is served by a tiny local web server that opens in your browser. The browser is just the window — there's no website and nothing is hosted. This kept it dependency-free and easy to ship as a portable ZIP.

You stay in control. Automatic matching is convenient, but game-name matching is never perfect, so there's a review step and an easy "this is the wrong game" correction.

Open source (MIT). Since it's an unsigned script that modifies shortcut icons, I think it's only fair that anyone can read exactly what it does before running it.

What it's NOT

  • It doesn't touch your actual games or launcher libraries — only the icon shown on the shortcut file.
  • It's Windows-only (it relies on Windows shortcuts, GDI+, and the shell).
  • It needs a free SteamGridDB API key. The app links you straight to where you create one.

Tech notes

The core is PowerShell. Icon generation uses GDI+ to build multi-size .ico files. The UI is a single-page HTML/CSS/JS app served over localhost via HttpListener, talking to the backend through a small JSON API. Matching normalizes the shortcut name (strips edition suffixes, symbols, bracketed tags) before searching SteamGridDB, then scores the candidates.

One honest limitation: applying icons isn't reversible from within the app right now. I had a backup/restore feature but pulled it because it wasn't reliable across Windows' icon caching — I'd rather ship no feature than a broken one. It may come back once I can make it work properly.

Try it

Source and download are on GitHub:

👉 https://github.com/YellowRed1705/game-icons-studio

It's a niche tool I mostly built for myself, but if you curate a folder of game shortcuts you might enjoy it. Honest feedback is very welcome — especially on the matching logic and the local-server-plus-browser-UI approach.

Cover art is provided by the wonderful SteamGridDB community. This is an independent project, not affiliated with SteamGridDB or any game publisher.

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