How to Customize the Quick Access icon in Windows 10 or 11

Quick access is a Windows 10 feature that shows you the list of frequently accessed folders and recent files. Also, under the Quick access section in the File Explorer navigation pane, you can pin your favorite folders.

This post tells you how to change the Quick Access icon from the default slanted blue star icon (in Windows 10) or yellow star (in Windows 11 v21H2 and earlier) to something else of your choice.

Change the Quick access icon

For Windows 10

The quick access icon can be modified by editing the “DefaultIcon” registry key under the Quick Access {GUID} key, just like the way you customize the icon for any other shell folder in Windows.

Want the yellow star icon instead of the slanted blue one? Here is the registry edit that does that.

1. Start the Registry Editor and go to the following key:

   HKEY_CURRENT_USER\SOFTWARE\Classes\CLSID

2. Create a subkey named {679f85cb-0220-4080-b29b-5540cc05aab6}
3. Under {679f85cb-0220-4080-b29b-5540cc05aab6}, create a key named DefaultIcon
4. With the DefaultIcon key selected, double-click the (default) value in the right pane.
5. Type in the DLL or custom icon file (.ico) path. Or, to change the Quick Access icon to a yellow star icon used by “Favorites”, as in Windows 7, 8, and Windows 11 (21H2 and earlier), use the icon from imageres.dll

   imageres.dll,-1024

   

6. Exit the Registry Editor.
7. Close all folder windows.
8. Reopen File Explorer to check if the Quick access icon is refreshed. If not, log off and log back in, or restart the Explorer shell for the change to take effect.

 

The yellow star icon may not be the fanciest of the stock icons inside imageres.dll or shell32.dll, nor does it accurately represent the functionality of Quick access. But the post may have served its purpose — to tell you how to modify the Quick access icon in the registry.

For Windows 11 v21H2 and earlier

On Windows 11, the Quick Access icon is already represented by a yellow star icon. If you wish to change it to the new “Home” icon (shown in Windows 11 Insider Builds higher than 21H2), follow these instructions for Windows 10. In Step 5, use homeicon.ico (download link) as the icon path.

Note: The Windows 11 Insider Builds higher than v21H2 already come with the new Home icon for Quick Access; so you don’t need to edit the registry for that. And, the Quick Access feature (and the icon’s caption) is changed to “Home” in the latest builds.

See also: Remove “Home” File Explorer in Windows 11