Resizr is a free online image editing site. I will allow you to use almost all the basic photo editing features. “RESIZR was conceived in July 2006 by Matt Miller, after trying to help a user upload an image to the Urban Pug Forums. After suggesting some tools, it became apparent that there might be a need for a brutally simple online image resizer.”

With Resizr you can Crop, Resize, Change filetype (GIF,PNG,JPG), sharpen, adjust levels, change the tone of the image (to B/W &&; sepia), adjust brightness and contrast and even control the quality of output file. Resizr is equivalent to a photo editing software. It is free and also saves your file for a specific amount of time before which you can download it.

Free tools have always been my favorite. You can see that under the free tag. If you don’t have any software to create an icon or cannot create a free icon as in the previous post, you must try this free online icon creator.

The site allows you to make 16×16px icons. You can also select an image make it to 16×16px and upload to the site and convert it to ico fromat. Since the canvas is highly magnified you can easily create shapes and write using the provided tools. After the work is finished the icon can be downloaded by clicking on the Download icon button on top.

Most of us would like to add a few custom icons to some folders or file types in our computers, but the problem is difficulty to find a good tool. I was personally a victim of so called icon maker when it turned out to be a virus once. It was a long time ago and I had no computer with me. Well since then I was a lot careful with softwares.

GIMP free photo editing software

None of the normal photo editing softwares comes with an inbuilt icon support except GIMP. GIMP is shipped along with Linux. you can obtain GIMP for Linux and GIMP for Windows. Well in Gimp there is not much to do just make the image size suitable for the icon like 16*16px , 32*32px or 48*48px and select Save As » icon format. This is simple.

Free Photoshop Plugin

You can open, edit and save in ICO format using this plugin. You can get the PhotoShop plugin for ICO icon file at Telegraphics. It is clean and I have been using it for more than 2 years now. Just download the plugin, extract ir and save the plugin file to Adobe\Plug-Ins\Import-Export folder in your Program Files. The download is light at only 107Kb. You can also save icons in PNG format for Vista.

Free Picture to icon converter – Pinxy

Pinxy is a free Image to Icon converter. It is light at only 14Kb, needs no installation, and can open bmp, jpg, gif, wmf, emf and ico files. First open the file in pinxy then select the area of file you want to convert to icon and then Save the icon file. Its that simple. The problem is that Pinxy has been not always successful in retaining the correct color information. I failed to find Pinxy on the net except on PCWorlds site, si I have uploaded my copy to my google page. The link at bottom is to that copy. Please scan it.

Test Icon files made by me

I have made some test icons using all the above three methods. Here are the links to the files :
Photoshop Icon | Gimp Icon | Pinxy Icon | Faulty Pinxy Icon

All the direct download links are given below :

Download Phtoshop free plugin (Direct Link) | Download Pinxy from my collections | GIMP for Windows at sourceforge