Custom icons on synced computers

I just set up a new Dell with Windows 11 and synced it to my old Win10 computer, also a Dell.
My problem is with desktop icons that call a URL. I have a bunch. They all have custom .ico's
On the Win10, I put them in Downloads and added them to the icon ("change icon" in properties)
from there. Worked great.
On the win11 desktop the shortcuts initialized as blank, so I "changed icon" on each of them from
a copy/paste recreation of Downloads, which didn't sync, but where I was ultimately able to
find them. All set, everything was lovely, just the duplicate I wanted.
Surprise!! When I went back to the old Win10 computer, all those same icons were blank. I reset
some of them and on returning to the Win11, those had become blank there. Trying back and
forth and even renaming a set, no matter what, each .ico image would only show up on ONE
computer. Note that blank or with .ico, all the underlying shortcuts functioned properly.
Any ideas?

Hi @DiBen. Welcome. I've had some success with this.

1. I created an Environment Variable (EV) - e.g., "MyCustomIcons" - that points to an Icons folder (the EV is necessary for me, as the path to the Icons folder varies on each device. If your paths are identical this may not be necessary.).
2. On each desktop shortcut you want to replicate, set the path to the icon using the EV (in Properties). MyCustomIcons is backed up to Dropbox.
3. Copy the contents of the source Desktop (I've learned the hard way not to use Dropbox' native functionality to back up the Desktop. Instead, I use a combination of Powershell and Task Scheduler to replicate Desktop contents in Dropbox instead of doing this manually).

You should then be able to restore desktop shortcuts to the target Device, and keep the icons in tact. There's probably a more efficient way, but...

Hope this helps!

Thank you, my dear.
However, you are so far over my head that I can't even see your toes.
I appreciate your response and am happy to see there might be a way.
If you ever have some open time, you might give me more detail on
the very first step.
Thanks, Ben

@DiBen Hi. The first step is only necessary if the path to your icons folder is different on your two devices. If they are different, the Environment Variable "normalizes" the paths, so when windows sees "MyCustomIcons", it substitutes the actual path for each device. If they're the same, I think your icons should be OK from the start.

1. Open the Start menu, type "environment var", and on the right, lower down, you'll see "Edit the system environment variables". Click on Open (EV1, below).
2. Click on the Environment Variables button (EV2, below)
3. In the User (not System) variables section at the top, click 'New.
4. Enter your variable name and the path to the icons folder (see EV3).
5. On your Desktop shortcut, right-click, select Properties, then click on the "Change Icon" button (EV4)
6. Under 'Look for icons in this file, enter the path using Environment Variable surrounded by "%" - e.g., %MyCustomIcons%\ThisIcon.ico (EV5)
7. Repeat steps 1-4 on the other device

Now when you copy the Desktop shortcut, it will point to the icons folder.

If you search for "Create Environment Variable Windows 11" you'll see many links. Here's one example (using a slightly different method to access the Environment Variables) Create new EV.

Let me know if any of this is unclear.

I bet your Windows 10 user name (and hence user folder) is different that the Windows 11 one. In that case, simply put the icons at a common folder such as C:\icons and sync again.