Where the toolbar options are
Click Prefs. Three entries near the bottom of the menu control appearance.
Show Captions turns the text labels under the icons on and off.
Use Custom Toolbar loads an image of your own.
Use Default Toolbar restores the built-in one, and it is ticked until you change something.
Loading your own image
Choose Use Custom Toolbar and select a bitmap file.
Bitmap is the only format it will take. The file dialog filters to it and offers nothing else, so there is no point converting a photo or exporting from a modern image editor without saving to that format first.
We do not yet know what dimensions the image has to be. Nor whether it must be a single strip containing every button, or separate files. We have not tested it, so we are not going to publish numbers that other people would then follow.
That is frustrating for a page whose whole subject is this feature, and it is the honest position. Everything else written about the custom toolbar online is either one line copied from the release notes, or invented. When we have tested it, the numbers go here, measured.
Turning the captions off
Show Captions removes the word under each button.
The window gets smaller and takes less space on screen. That is the real reason to use it. If you keep the program visible while a macro runs, and especially if you have Always on Top enabled, a smaller window gets in the way less.
The cost is obvious. Without labels you have to know the icons. Open, Save, Rec, Play, .exe and Prefs, in that order, left to right. If you are new to the program, leave the captions on until that order is second nature. The buttons and what each one does are covered in the how to use TinyTask guide.
Putting it back
Choose Use Default Toolbar. The original buttons return immediately.
Your custom image is not deleted and it is not modified. The program simply stops using it. Switch back to the custom one whenever you like.
If something goes wrong and neither option seems to work, deleting the settings file resets every preference at once, including this one. That is covered on the settings file page.
Why this feature exists at all
It looks like an odd thing to include in a program this small. It is not, once you know the history.
The toolbar was redesigned in a later release specifically to be readable on high resolution displays. Larger buttons, drawn to survive on a screen where the old ones had become tiny. The custom toolbar option arrived alongside that work.
That tells you what it is for. It is not decoration. It is an escape hatch for people whose display makes the default buttons awkward, on a program that has no scaling settings of its own. If the buttons are the wrong size on your screen, this is the only lever you have. Display scaling problems more generally are covered on the Windows 11 page.
What a custom toolbar will not do
It will not add buttons. The program has the buttons it has. You are changing their appearance, not the set.
It will not rearrange them. The order is fixed.
It will not change any behaviour. A button that looks different still does exactly what it did before. Hotkeys are unaffected, and those are set separately on the hotkeys page.
It will not survive being copied without the image. If the settings file records where your image is, and you move the folder without the image, the program will not find it. Keep the image inside the same folder as the program and copy them together.
Frequently asked questions
Open Prefs, choose Use Custom Toolbar, and select a bitmap image. Choose Use Default Toolbar to go back.
Bitmap, and nothing else. The file dialog filters to that format and will not offer you anything different.
We do not know yet and we are not going to guess. The numbers published elsewhere are unsourced. This answer will be replaced with a measured one.
Open Prefs and turn off Show Captions. The window becomes smaller and the icons remain.
No. It changes only how they look. The set of buttons, their order and their behaviour are all fixed.
No. There is no stop button in the program and a custom image cannot create one. Recording stops with the same button that started it, and playback stops with Pause or ScrollLock.
Most likely the image is no longer where the program expects it. Keep the image in the same folder as the executable, alongside the settings file described on the settings file page.