Best Free Icon Editor and Replacer

 
In a Hurry?
  Go straight to the Quick Selection Guide
Introduction

Icon editors allow you to edit an icon file, which is basically an image file with the .ico extension and contains one or more small images at multiple sizes and colour depths. They also allow you to create new icons to replace your program or system icons, and favicons (short for favorites icons) that are used on websites, as seen in the browser address bar, tabs and bookmarks, such as this Gizmo's favicon.

An icon editor needs to have a program or system icon replacement function also built in, otherwise the icons you create cannot easily be used.

Icons are normally saved at 32 x 32px 256-color .ico files, but 48 x 48px, 64 x 64px, or 128 x 128px is sometimes used. Favicons need to be saved as 16 x 16px 256-color .ico files. You can create icons in full-color (and it's best to do so), but favicons for web use need to be saved in 256-color -- don't save your icons in any other profile or format as they will not be able to be viewed on some platforms.

Discussion

Greenfish Icon Editor ProNot all Pro software products are commercial. Greenfish Icon Editor Pro is indeed a freeware program, complete with professional tools to create, edit, open and save icon files. It allows you to extract and patch icons in the executable files, or batch convert image files to icons and other image formats.

The program handles icon libraries and supports ico, cur, ani, png, xpm, bmp, jpg and gif image file formats, including Vista compatible png compressed icons.

In addition to icons, it allows you to design cursors, small pixel graphic, animation or static images. Some other useful features such as drop shadow, glow and bevel are supported.

This program is designed for ease of use, lightweight and portable, just download the zip file and run the executable.

IcoFXAlternatively, IcoFX is a good freeware icon editor which is worth a try. It has a wealth of tools and equipped with more than 40 image effects, but common to most image editors, you need to spend some time to get familiar with the tools.

The program allows you to create icons for your programs, setup files, or favicons for your website or blog. It also allows you to convert your favorite images to icons, or icons to images. Conversion between Macintosh and Windows icons are supported.

Other features include supporting Vista icons with PNG compression, true color, transparency (alpha channel) and batch processing capability.

Similar to Greenfish Icon Editor Pro, IcoFX allows you to create icon libraries, extract and patch icons inside the executable files. However, on some executable files which I tried, the former seems work better than the latter.

Tips

Extract a favicon from a web page?

Google provides a simple service to extract a favicon and return it in a png file format from a web page. By entering the following in the address bar with a specific domain (e.g. techsupportalert.com), you will get one.

http://www.google.com/s2/favicons?domain=techsupportalert.com

Have Your Say
You are invited to share and discuss your views in our freeware forum.  To post in the forum you need to register first but that's quick and immediate. Alternatively, anyone can leave a comment at the bottom of this page.
 

Please help us by rating this review

Related Products and Links

Free Icon Sets:

You might want to check out these articles too:

Quick Selection Guide

Greenfish Icon Editor Pro    Rating 9 of 10  Gizmo's Top Pick

Pros   Create, edit, open and save icon files, extract and patch icons in executable files, batch convert, gradient styles and filters, etc.
Cons   To be added.
Developer Home Page   http://greenfish.extra.hu/downloads.php
Download link   http://greenfish.extra.hu/downloads.php
File Size   927 KB   Version 1.72   License Type Unrestricted Freeware   Installation Requirements Windows 95 to Vista
Portable version available   This program is portable.
Info   Supported image files: ico, cur, ani, png, xpm, bmp, jpg and gif.

IcoFX    Rating 8 of 10

Pros   Plenty to tools, more than 40 image effects, convert between Macintosh and Windows icons, batch processing capability, etc.
Cons   Extracting and patching icons in some executable files are found not as good as Greenfish Icon Editor Pro.
Developer Home Page   http://icofx.ro/
Download link   http://icofx.ro/
File Size   1.46 MB   Version v1.6.4   License Type Unrestricted Freeware   Installation Requirements Win 98 to XP
Portable version available   Portable version available here.
Editor

This article is maintained by volunteer editor Jojoyee. Registered site users are allowed to edit and improve this article wiki-style.

Tags

icon editor, icon replacer, free icon, freeware, favorite icon, favicon, system icon, folder icon, file icon, program icon, setup file icon, website icon, web icon, shortcut icon, url icon, bookmark icon

Back to the top of the article

4.2
Average: 4.2 (5 votes)
Your rating: None

i begin with a small img (eg: "icon size" image search for reactos, or haiku, etc) Then resize in irfanview so i have 16,32,48px icon files.
then load all 3 into @iconsushi, and save as one multiicon.

but I'd rather have an app that can do all of that within a few builtin commands. perhaps i could write batch to do much of it but, besides writing&debug effort, I'd like to monitor the intermediate visual results.

i wonder if any iconeditor can export to base64?

Greenfish Icon Editor Pro - Cool things!))) 5 balls!!!

One downside to Greenfish Icon Editor Pro is that the resize function does not anti-alias the pixel information, making for ragged resizes and loss of detail. :(

True. I normally use Paint .NET in conjunction with Greenfish when I need to resize. I use Greenfish regularly and think it's great. Only real annoyance I've found is if you open Windows Task Manager when you are running Greenfish then you'll get a bunch of error boxes you'll have to close.

Nice work Jojo!!

chris.p

For those of us (most of us) who have neither the time nor the inclination to go off editing system icons, Folder Marker Free allows you to better organise and highlight your personal stuff http://www.foldermarker.com/folder-marker-free.php

How about Greenfish Icon Editor Pro? (http://greenfish.extra.hu/downloads.php)
It is support more format (work with ICO, CUR, ANI, PNG, XPM, BMP, JPEG and GIF files - open & save)!
Easy to use, lightweight, no installation (portable)

Even it's called Pro, it's a free and good program though, with animation feature.

IcoFX is a gem, a good piece of free software for creating, editing and extracting icons, plus many other features. Check it out.

http://icofx.ro/

Fully agree - IcoFx is a really powerful editor

Post new comment

  • Web page addresses and e-mail addresses turn into links automatically.
  • Allowed HTML tags: <a> <b> <address> <blockquote> <br> <caption> <center> <code> <dd> <del> <div> <dl> <dt> <em> <font> <h2> <h3> <h4> <h5> <h6> <hr> <i> <img> <li> <ol> <p> <pre> <span> <strong> <sub> <sup> <table> <tbody> <td> <tfoot> <th> <thead> <tr> <u> <ul> <tr>
  • Lines and paragraphs break automatically.
  • [node:123] - insert full text (themed by theme('node'))
    [node:123 body] - insert node's body
    [node:123 teaser] - insert node's teaser
    [node:123 link] - insert link to node
    [node:123 collapsed] - insert collapsed node's body
  • You may use [view:viewname] tags to display listings of nodes.

More information about formatting options