Best Free Icon Editor and Replacer

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Last updated by Jojo Yee on 25. November 2020 - 11:59

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.

 

Rated Products

Greenfish Icon Editor Pro  

Designed for ease of use, lightweight and portable

Our Rating: 
4.5
License: Free

This freeware program has professional tools to create, edit, open and save icon files, and allows you to extract and patch icons in the executable files, or batch convert image files to icons and other image formats.

Read full review...

IcoFX  

A wealth of icon editing tools and equipped with more than 40 image effects

Our Rating: 
4
License: Free (Last free version)

This good freeware icon editor has a wealth of tools for you to create icons for programs, setup files or favicons and convert your favorite images to icons, or icons to images.

Read full review...

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

 

Related Products and Links

Free Icon Sets:

You might want to check out these articles too:

 

Editor

This category is maintained by volunteer editor Jojo Yee. Registered members can contact the editor with comments or suggestions by clicking here.
You can visit the Google+ profile page of Jojo Yee here.

 

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Comments

"... Junior Icon Editor 4.33 will help you to: - Create and edit icons in color depths up to 16 million colors - Create and edit icons for Windows XP, Vista, 7, 8 in 32-bit color depth with 8-bit alpha channel - Edit .png icons for web, Linux, Android, iOS, WP7 - Paint images with pen, brush, airbrush, ellipse, rectangle, line, curve tools - Roll, shift and rotate images - Import and export .ico, .png, .xpm, .xbm, and .icpr formats - Sort images inside icons - Copy and paste images to other applications - Copy and paste color values from the clipboard ...": http://www.sibcode.com/junior-icon-editor/index.htm
Thanks Panzer for the suggestion. I tried it but found that it was pretty basic when compared with those selected. Each time you run this program, it prompts you to purchase icons from its related websites, some of which are badly rated at Web of Trust.

I registered just to say thank you so much. It's not easy to find a freeware program to extract icons from .exes.

Same here, registered just to say thanks. :)

Thanks for posting :). Glad you could find something of use.