Introduction
First of
all, let’s explain that an overlay icon is a small icon that is shown in the
bottom left part of normal icons, if you are using any version control
software, dropbox, skydrive, Google drive… software you will have seen them as
green marks telling you which is the synchronization status.
Windows 8
has a limit of 15 icon overlays. This means that if you are using various
applications that use them, you can be in trouble as some
of them can simply not be shown.
You won’t
be able to get more than 15 overlay icons shown, but at least you will be able
to select which ones you are interested in.
Background
You will
need to know how to access, navigate and edit the Windows registry.
Also you will
need to know how to restart Windows Explorer (or spending time restarting your
computer).
How to Proceed
Open
regedit (Windows+R -> write regedit
-> press
enter).
Navigate to
the following key:
HKLM\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\ShellIconOverlayIdentifiers\
Here you
will see a list of all the icon overlays that are installed in your system.
The
operating system will show only the first 15 (alphabetically sorted).
Then you
can define which ones you want to show by changing their names.
In my case,
I have Subversion, Google drive and Acronis installed:
As you can
see in the picture, I’ve added A# in front of each GDrive icon to get Google
Drive status icons shown where # is a
number.
The first 15 icons will be shown when needed. After changing the names of the GDrive icon
set and restarting the Windows Explorer, GDrive icons were shown.
