![A static image shows a pink heart-shaped object on a gray background with a vertical crack, accompanied by the text 'luke:]' in white pixelated font.](/image/a789b34f943bfd4f9eb6ad0d3159fbf4014104d14f48c288d16b486ccb38be23)
![Four identical pink square with blue borders display red pixelated text reading 'I [are] mad so much!' and a small heart or star symbol in the bottom-right corner of one](/image/a7c07a3f362791fe4d262dfc8660774bb188d6c1ec8d851dd661c2261288c3cf){kind=small}
Preserving the tiny pictures that made the internet personal.
Category shelf
Browse 63,636 preserved Hearts AIM buddy icons gathered from 399 source collections. This automatically maintained collection currently includes 60,228 animated icons and 63,634 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