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Have you ever found a good Google Chrome extension and the icon just sucks?  There are some good extensions out there but fail in the nice-looking-icon department to suit my tastes. A big ugly icon stuck up in the tool bar just ruins my day when the option to hide it just doesn’t cut it.

Today, I took some time out to see if I could actually change the icons that come installed with Google Chrome extensions.  It was actually much easier that I thought it would be.

Here is what you can do to change up a Google Chrome extension icon:

My target extension to change the icons was the Neat Bookmarks extension. I love the extension but just didn’t care too much for the big blue square icon.

The image on the right is what I ended up with by creating a custom chrome extension icon.

First, you will need to decide on what icons that you want.  In this case, I wanted something minimal that represented a bookmark and a folder icon to match.  Use .png files with transparent backgrounds so that if you change your theme, it will still look decent.  The icon that I wanted to replace was sized at 19px by 16px, but I replaced with 16px by 16px.  Chrome seemed to let it size perfectly and I didn’t notice much of a difference at all with the change.

Here are three good places to locate replacement icons for chrome extensions:
http://www.iconarchive.com/
http://www.iconspedia.com/
http://p.yusukekamiyamane.com/

Once you have located and saved the icons to your desktop, you will now have to find the directory where the chrome extensions are stored.  The Google Chrome extension file location for Windows 7 can be similar to what I have here:

C:\Users\*YOURUSERNAME*\AppData\Local\Google\Chrome\User Data\Default\Extensions

Now, that you have made it to that folder, the guessing game begins.  The chrome extension folders are not named with something easy.  Instead, they are marked with odd strings of letters.  The best thing to do is to open each folder and then open the options.htm file.  By doing this, it should provide you with a decent clue on what extension you are looking at.

The folder that I found the Neat Bookmarks extension in was called: nnancliccjabjjmipbpjkfbijifaainp\0.8.8_0

Now that you have found the correct extension folder, its time to copy over the newly found icons into this location. The icons should have the exact same file name of the icons that you are replacing to where you are overwriting and replacing.  Before you do this, its probably a good idea to make a quick back up of the old icons.

Once you have replaced the old icons with the new, open up Google Chrome or restart if you already had it open to check out your changes.

That’s it! Its that easy.  If you are using Neat Bookmarks and want to give it a try, here are the exact icons that I am using.  Save ‘em and give it a shot.