Shell City mentioned the online script Bradicon today which is a stripped down version of the function in IcoFx. If IcoFx would be a commercial product then Bradicon could be its free version. It basically accepts an image and creates an icon from that image.

The icon will be provided in ico format as a download after the creation has finished. The icons that I tested were provided in 48×48 format only but it should not be a problem to resize them manually. The website contains no information about the supported image formats, I was able to upload png and jpg images without difficulties.

Bradicon is a nice alternative to IcoFx or similar products especially if you have to work in an environment where you are not allowed to download and install any additional software.

IcoFx could be the icon editor of choice then for you. It can create Icons for Windows 98 to Windows Vista and Macintosh OS X computers and provides functions to convert icons from Mac to Windows (and Windows to Mac) and to extract icons from 32-bit exe and dll files. One great feature is the ability to add, change or delete icons in executables which means that you could permanently change icons of explorer.exe for instance.

The interface looks clean, crisp and is very responsive to user input. The most gorgeous feature in my opinion is the ability to create icons from images. Just select an image on your hard drive and select the color depths and size of the icon that you want to create in the first step and use the advanced import settings to pick a specific part of the image, change the resolution and transparency.

The icon will then be created and can be saved in the usual icon formats. Colors range from 2 colors to True Color + Alpha Channels which equals 1-bit to 32-bit. Supported resolutions are 16×16, 24×24, 32×32, 48×48, 256×256 and custom resolutions.

Different sizes can be created and merged by dragging and dropping them into one icon window which has the effect that several sizes are supported in the icon file that will be created.

I know that design is not everything that counts and that functionality should be more important – are you listening Microsoft ? – but it really blows every other icon editor away when it comes to looks. Pixelformer can load high resolution images without difficulties, I remember some icon editors that would only accept images of a certain dimension. The memory footprint of Pixelformer is tiny, it uses less than 3 Megabytes after startup.

What I really like is the fact that it is possible to import icons from the computer. If you pick a file that contains more than one icon, explorer.exe, for instance then you get to choose the icon that you want to load. While the icons can be loaded from executables, system files and images they can only be imported as image files with the ico file type as the obvious choice here. Three other file types are available.

Pixelformer is an easy to use stunning looking icon editor that comes with enough functionality to make most professional icon creators happy.