idea ARC GIS icon size issues in ArcGIS Pro Ideas

ARC GIS icon size issues

AndrewTaylor — Mon, 20 Sep 2021 16:45:44 GMT

The ARCGIS ArcMap toobar icons were annoyingly small on my machine, so I changed my icon size to "Large Icons" (right click on toolbar area>Customize>Options>clicked on "Large Icons").

The problem is, the resultant large icons were too big and extremely pixelated and ugly.

ESRI should create a new set of toolbar icon images be created that weren't pixelated, and preferably a little smaller than the current ""Large Icons" selection.

Re: ARC GIS icon size issues

MichaelGrün — Wed, 19 Oct 2011 16:09:43 GMT

Damn right! Please create larger and well resoluted icons.

Re: ARC GIS icon size issues

JohnKerkering1 — Sat, 17 Mar 2012 20:20:11 GMT

Compltely agree. As an instructor, I would like to integrate these icons into my tutorials and PowerPoint slides. The available crop of icons are much too small to be integrated into a PowerPoint and have them still be discernible to an audience. As they stand, they become too blurry and pixelated when stretched beyond 1 square inch.

Re: ARC GIS icon size issues

AlexanderGray — Mon, 15 Oct 2012 20:24:24 GMT

This goes for developers too. Making a useful icon in a 32X32 image is almost impossible. This is so limitting!

Re: ARC GIS icon size issues

JohnDye — Mon, 20 Jan 2014 14:50:42 GMT

Agree, this a pretty dumb issue for ESRI to let sit idle.

We do a lot of MXD customization so I investigated this. The issue really comes down to ArcGIS only having a single 16x16 iconset and simply upscaling those 16x16 icons to 32x32 when you select 'Large Icons' in the Customizations menu instead of switching out the iconset like any other decently written program on the face of the earth would do.

I had to resort to creating new 32x32 png icons and installing them on the toolbars and then saving that out as a custom 'Large Icons MXD'.

I then whipped up a little AutoHotKey script, pulled the ArcMap Icon from the bin folder and created a 'ArcMap.exe' , that prompts whether to use large icons or small icons. If you pick large, it launches the large icons MXD, small, it launches the small icons MXD.

It was a real pain and took a couple of months to recreate all of the icons I have thus far and there are still more icons for toolbars I don't have or rarely use which are missing from my set.

This is really, really, really stupid ESRI. Fix it.

Re: ARC GIS icon size issues

SteveRodriguez — Tue, 02 Aug 2016 16:03:03 GMT

Agreed, with higher resolution monitors, this is a very annoying issue. Seems exacerbated in Windows 10, if the icons are small, they're fuzzy, and when large, the look horrible.

Re: ARC GIS icon size issues

AlexanderGray — Tue, 02 Aug 2016 17:21:42 GMT

Don't hold your breath, this is much improved in ArcGIS Pro so I doubt esri's going to double back and change this in ArcMap.

Re: ARC GIS icon size issues

SteveRodriguez — Wed, 03 Aug 2016 06:07:07 GMT

Yeah that was the impression that I got from the conference. All the R&D and development will be going towards Pro. We’ll see 10.5 around the end of the year, but I think that’ll be it for a while.

I actually did find that if I increase my display size to 125% it made the small icons much easier to see, less fuzzy.

Re: ARC GIS icon size issues - Status changed to: Implemented

KoryKramer — Fri, 12 Nov 2021 22:57:56 GMT

ArcGIS Pro 2.9 offers a user interface scaling option: https://pro.arcgis.com/en/pro-app/latest/get-started/user-interface-options.htm#ESRI_SECTION1_715C0063E85C491C865F3897155C214A

See for more ideas included in the release, and 4:04 for a quick demo.