3 Ways to Remove the Green Check Mark on Windows Desktop Icons

Green checkmarks on your Windows desktop icons show the sync status with cloud services – usually  Microsoft OneDrive since it’s built into Windows. While useful, these can be distracting. Today’s article explains how to remove these checkmarks and revert the icons back to their original state.

What does the green check mark on your desktop icons mean?

The desktop icon typically displays two types of green checkmarks—a green-bordered checkmark or a solid green checkmark. Each is a visual indicator of different sync statuses for your files with OneDrive.

Dark green check mark

A dark green check mark appears on files you mark as Always keep on this device . It indicates that a file is not only synced, but also available offline in OneDrive.

Check mark with green border

A green outlined check mark indicates that the file or folder is stored online-only, indicating that it is stored in the cloud and not on your local device. To access such a file offline, you need to download it to your device. If you later want to switch the file back to online-only and free up space on your device, right-click the file and select Free up space .

How to remove green check mark on desktop icons

While green checkmarks are helpful indicators, they can be visually distracting. Here are three simple methods for removing green checkmarks if you want to - note that removing these green status icons does not affect your files.

1. Pause sync in OneDrive

You can temporarily remove the green check mark by pausing your device's syncing with OneDrive. This won't delete any data, but your files and changes won't sync with OneDrive (and therefore won't be available on your other devices) until you resume syncing. Here's how to pause your files syncing with OneDrive .

Next, look at your desktop icons and see if the green checkmark is gone. For example, the author of this article originally had a green checkmark overlaying one of his desktop icons. This is shown on the right side in the screenshot below:

After pausing the sync, the checkmark disappears, as shown here:

2. Close OneDrive or unlink your account from the service

Stopping OneDrive will remove the green checkmark and stop the sync process. This is similar to pausing sync, except OneDrive won't perform any actions until you open it again (which will happen on startup if you set it to open every time you start up).

To stop the OneDrive service, click the OneDrive icon in the system tray.

From there, follow these steps:

1. Click the gear icon in the upper right corner.
2. Expand the Pause Syncing drop-down menu .
3. Click the Quit OneDrive option .

If you've decided you no longer want to use OneDrive on your PC, you can unlink your Windows account from OneDrive. This will completely disable the service unless you sign back into the OneDrive app and set up sync again.

3. Use Registry Editor to change overlay icon settings

This method involves tweaking the Windows Registry - a powerful tool that controls many aspects of your Windows device. Here's how to remove the green checkmark using the Registry Editor:

Warning : Be careful with Registry Editor as incorrect changes can affect system stability. To be safe, consider backing up the registry before proceeding.

1. Press Win + R , type regedit and press Enter to open Registry Editor .
2. Type the following command into the address bar and press Enter :

 HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\ShellIconOverlayIdentifiers

Under the ShellIconOverlayIdentifiers folder , you'll find a list of subkeys that represent different overlay icons. Cloud storage services like OneDrive, Google Drive, or Dropbox often add subkeys for their overlay icons here.

To remove overlay icons, delete or rename the entries related to your cloud service. Let's say you're using OneDrive. To remove the green checkmark on your desktop icons, rename the registry subkeys OneDrive1 and OneDrive2 so they appear at the end of the list. For example, rename them to "z_OneDrive1", "z_OneDrive2", etc.

Alternatively, you can delete the OneDrive registry subkeys to remove the green checkmark. However, deleting these subkeys may not be ideal as you will not be able to determine the OneDrive sync status.

After you rename or delete subkeys, restart your computer to save these changes.