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Since every web designer or programmer needs at least one icon in his/her lifetime, I decided to write a post that shows you some freeware icon editors which really make the most shareware icon editors unnecessary.

If you already have an image editor such as GIMP, PhotoShop or PhotoImpact which you are used to, you can as well edit a small image with it and import it to into an icon editor, to save it as an icon after adding transparent zones and so on. That is not needed of course if it supports saving files as an icon.

This can save money buying a professional icon editor.Be careful when using online image conversion services such as the Online Image Converter from www.coolutils.com. It did not create firefox compatible icons for me. Using IconEdit32 instead it worked fine.

Here is a list of some free icon editors which you can find on the internet.

IcoFX 1.5

IcoFX is a professional icon editor that can easily keep up with icon editors that cost 10-39$. The best about it is: It’s free! The special features are:

• Can open and save ICO, CUR, PNG, XPM, BMP and JPEG files.
• Supports PNG-compression of icons for use in Windows Vista.
• Can extract icons from executable files and icon binaries (you can take/steal icons from other programs).
• Lots of filters that are usually not contained in freeware software.

It’s worth a try if you are looking for a freeware icon editor and working a lot with icons.

Greenfish Icon Editor Pro 1.4

Greenfish Icon Editor Pro is an icon editor that is very similar to the IcoFX icon editor, in both, look and features. Should IcoFX not work for you for some reason, you can try this one.

Junior Icon Editor 2.0

Junior Icon Editor also offers features similar to IcoFX. But the interface looks very simple. The third version of this icon editor went from freeware to shareware.

aaICO - Freeware Icon Editor 3.0

The aaICO - Freeware Icon Editor is an icon editor with a very user friendly interface. It looks a bit like Junior Icon Editor but I find it even simpler to use.

SC Free Icon Editor 1.2.0.1

SC Free Icon Editor is an easy-to-use editor that has all the functions for creating/editing icon files. It includes filters such as blurring, sharpening, embossing, color balancing and some other. To me the black user interface looks a bit too nerdy.

IconEdit32 1.0.0

The IconEdit32 icon editor is a classic program that was freeware once, but PC Mag is now demanding a downloading fee. You can still find a free download link on Google by entering “iedit32.zip”. It is a small and easy to use icon editor which I do most of my icon jobs with.

Goldicon 1.12

Goldicon’s authors say:

To be of assistance, Goldshell has created a small icon editor, which allows you to create an icon in record-time. And more good news: it’s for free!

And it seems they are right about that. Simple icon editor just like IconEdit32 which has the usual features.

IconSuite 2.1.12

IconSuite is a fully featured Icon editor which is capable of creating icon and cursor files containing icons of different sizes and color depths. It can import pictures of any size and export them as a bitmap. It is not so well known but it is a nice alternative to IconEdit32, if you should not like it for any reason.

Iconoplasm 2

The Iconoplasm 2 icon editor may perhaps have some nifty feautures and tools but to me it looks like it was done in a programming course. Well, if you are not the visual type of person then this might be a good choice for you. It has TWAIN driver support and can extract icons from EXE and DLL files.

Know some more? Tell me and I will add them.

Tags: editing, editor, icon

Posted on Monday, January 14th, 2008 at 9:48 pm in Graphics.
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