More On Icon Creators For Mac OS X

In the previous post, I talked about the nice little application called Pic2Icon, which is a great tool to use if you want to create icons out of picture files. What Pic2Icon does is it uses the contents of an image or picture file to create an icon, which it then applies to that original image file. So in effect, the original image file, ends up having a thumbnail of itself. There are other icon creation programs out there that are able to convert images into actual Apple Icon Image files (this type of file has a .ICNS extension), instead of just creating thumbnails. These Apple Icon Images or ICNS files can then be used as icons for your Mac applications.

One such application that creates ICNS files is Iconverter by Extraneous Software. This FREE program allows you to convert image files into ICNS files. It supports formats such as JPG and PNG, to name a few. You can use it to convert single files or choose to process an entire batch. It also allows you to go the other way around and convert ICNS files into image files instead. Oh, and it lets you convert pictures into Windows Icons too (those files have .ICO extensions).

Pic2Icon vs Iconverter
Pic2Icon has options for anti-aliasing and adding drop shadows, while Iconverter does not. However, these are things that you can easily add when you create your images using a graphics editor like Adobe Photoshop. If you have a poor quality image to begin with, applying anti-aliasing and adding a drop shadow to it using Pic2Icon is NOT likely to result in a significant improvement in quality. Iconverter, on the other hand, can create actual ICNS files. This feature makes it the icon creator of my choice.