Many of us must have thought to create Custom Desktop or Dash Shortcut with custom Icon. Simplest way to creating shortcut is to  right-click and select Make a Link option. Using this option what we get is an ugly shortcut with shortcut symbol. What is even worse is that we can’t place this shortcut on dash bar.  And suppose we want to drag and drop Firefox Icon to desktop, but we can’t do it.

But creating a Custom Shortcut with custom Icon is pretty easy. Let us tart with example of custom shortcut of Picture

folder.  Let us first create a custom Icon for Picture Folder.  Get a cool image and resize it to 80X80 pixel. I downloaded an image and resized it to 80X80 Pixel. See what I get .

Now open any text editor and write following Code:

[Desktop Entry] 
Version=1
Name=Photo
Comment=Shortcut to Picture folder 
Exec=gnome-open /home/kumar/Picture 
Icon=/home/kumar/Pictures/picture_folder_icon.png 
Terminal=false 
Type=Application
Categories=Utility;Application;

save this file with name of Photo.desktop or any filename.desktop. Now go to properties of this file and make it executable. That's all. 

Similarly you can make custom shortcut icon to any file,folder,URL or executable file.

Let me take you through an another example: I downloaded ADK (Android Development Kit),which is nothing but a
compressed file Which contain Eclipse and other executable files. To start ADK (eclipse),every time I had to go to the directory where I extracted it. I  cut out an image from the splash screen of ADK and create
following Desktop Configuration file to create shortcut, which I can place on the Dash bar:

[Desktop Entry]
Version=1
Name=ADT-Eclipse
Comment=Eclipse for ADT
Exec=/home/kumar/Development/Android/adt-bundle/eclipse/eclipse
Icon=/home/kumar/Development/Android/adt-bundle/eclipse/icon.png
Terminal=false
Type=Application
Categories=Utility;Application;

Saved this file as filename.desktop and make it executable. See what I get:<a href="https://www.technohunk.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/08/adk_icon.png"><img class="alignnone size-full wp-image-755" alt="adk_icon" src="https://www.technohunk.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/08/adk_icon.png" width="295" height="153" /></a>

Comment here, if you find trouble in making custom shortcut Icon. Cheers!!