Buddy Icon Archive

Buddy Icon Archive preserves the tiny pictures and animated GIFs people used beside their AOL Instant Messenger screen names. It brings together more than half a million icons from a part of the web that is steadily disappearing.

How it started

I needed authentic AIM buddy icons for another project. A small reference collection grew into thousands of files, then hundreds of thousands. Once finding and organizing them had become its own problem, I turned the collection into a public archive.

What the archive preserves

The archive keeps original image files, records their source URLs, and groups duplicate and near-duplicate copies. Preserving the original files matters for the animations as well as the pixels: these icons carried jokes, fandoms, moods, and a surprising amount of personality in a very small space.

Finding your icon

Browse the gallery by category or search descriptions and tags. Filters help distinguish animated GIFs from still images, and sensitive material is excluded from default browsing. The site also explains the history of buddy icons and how the collection is preserved.

Explore or contribute

You can browse the collection, download the archive, or contribute icons and source sites that are missing. The related blog post below tells the longer story of building the crawler, sorting the collection, and trying to track down the rest of it.