![A bright pink background displays black pixelated text reading "I Love Armando [1/26/08]" with five white and light pink heart symbols below, where the third heart changes from white to light pink between two states.](/image/69930fc2b62c03c29dac078c82213e26955de5968c904a71aecd02232ce6f25f){kind=small}
Preserving the tiny pictures that made the internet personal.
Category shelf
Browse 38,948 preserved Hearts AIM buddy icons gathered from 367 source collections. This automatically maintained collection currently includes 36,252 animated icons and 38,946 icons with searchable visual descriptions.
A language of tiny pictures
A picture barely 50 pixels wide, sitting beside an AIM screen name, could announce a mood, a fandom, an inside joke, or who someone wanted to be that day.
Read the short historyRecovered from the early web
Buddy icons survive in old directories, fan sites, downloadable packs, and web archives. The archive preserves the original files, groups known copies, and records where each one was found.
How the archive works