Dropbox Icons – Identify Icon Overlay Identifier Names

dropboxiconsoverlaytortoise-svnwindows 7

Since Windows can only handle 15 icon overlay identifiers and the rest get ignored I though I can move the ones I want to the top and only have the ones I need.

In terms of Tortoise SVN it's very easy to find out which icons you're ruling out since the names are relevant. Say, I know the name 1TortoiseModified is relevant with the following overlay:

enter image description here

However, the Dropbox overlay are called "DropboxEx1", "DropboxExt2" and so on. We got 8 of them and I wanted to know which ones are relevant to which ones then I make sure I am not ignoring the important ones with this renaming strategy I've adopted.

enter image description here

Obviously the ones after 333SharingPrivate are going to be ignored since they already hit the 15 mark.

Best Answer

I went through and enabled/disabled each Dropbox Shell Icon Overlays and found the following results below on Windows 7 x64 and Dropbox 2.10.30.

The 8 icon overlays are as follows:

| Icon Overlay | Color (Icon) | Status                                    |
| ------------ | ------------ | ----------------------------------------- |
| DropboxExt1  | Green        | Synced!                                   |
| DropboxExt2  | Blue         | Sync in progress                          |
| DropboxExt3  | Green (lock) | Synced! (locked file)                     |
| DropboxExt4  | Blue (lock)  | Sync in progress (locked file)            |
| DropboxExt5  | Red          | Sync not happening                        |
| DropboxExt6  | Red (lock)   | Sync not happening (locked file)          |
| DropboxExt7  | Gray         | A file/folder isn't syncing               |
| DropboxExt8  | Gray (lock)  | A file/folder isn't syncing (locked file) |

There are not separate overlays for files and folders. Disabling one of the overlays above will affect both. The 4 primary status icons described in this Dropbox help doc are 1, 2, 5, and 7. Overlays 3, 4, 6 and 8 are duplicates of the primary 4, but for locked files. (Thanks BeingInquisitive)

NirSoft's ShellExView is a handy tool to enable/disable Shell Icon Overlays without needing to mess around in the registry. Windows will apply the first 15 Enabled overlays.

If you prefer the manual approach, you can still rename or delete the entries under 

HKLM\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\ShellIconOverlayIdentifiers

Note: For either approach you have to kill/restart the explorer.exe process(es) for the changes to take effect.

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