Iconize Your Bitmaps

Turning beautiful digital images into great looking icons can be one of the simplest tasks you can do nowadays. All you need is one megabyte of Bmp2Icon.

Everyone has their stack of photos that are kept in virtual albums, written on optical discs or just stored in some folder on a local drive or online. Some of these pictures we use to personalize the desktop background and screensaver, even fewer as avatars on who knows which social networks we roam, while the vast majority of our images wait the rare glance we offer them on such seldom occasions. But there is something else we can use them for and keep a closer contact with more of them: make icons out of our bitmaps.

This is not exactly rocket science, so everybody is invited to join the fun, because it certainly is a pleasurable activity you can undergo. The requirements couldn't be easier to fulfill: simply grab a pile of photos and the appropriate tool and you're set. No need to dig deep for the software, here's something you can use for free and with no installation necessary. It is called Bmp2Icon and, no doubt, you can guess what it's all about from its name.

One zipped application, ready to go as soon as the package is open, waits for you to feed it some images in BMP format and you know what it will do to them: turn the unsuspecting bitmaps into fine-looking icons that you can use to customize the appearance of your files and folders. Small, easy to use and with zero cost, this utility sounds quite promising at first glimpse, nonetheless there is a ''but'' or two about it.

Once you start the little app, you'll have in front of you a rather small-scaled interface, with a non-resizable main window which hosts all the functions. Insofar as the operational aspect is concerned, among the first things you will notice is the lack of support for batch jobs and that can take the wind out of your sail, especially if you hoped to convert entire directories of pictures to ICO format files.

Loading a single image at a time can be time-consuming and tedious at times, but the upside is that you will give special attention to each bitmap, thusly avoiding the unnecessary processing of broken or otherwise unwanted pictures. To help you see what you're doing, Bmp2Icon sports a small preview window that shows you exactly how the icons will look like in the selected dimension.

Something that is closely related to the fact that you cannot maximize the GUI, or at least make it a bit larger, is the undersized BMP preview area. This may be bothersome at times, particularly when dealing with large and highly detailed digital photos. Also, the part of the application that allows you to navigate to the desired image is affected, because the tree view obscures the file name in case you have to expand a few subfolders.

The default icon sizes are to be found in a drop-down list and are four in all: 16x16, 32x32, 48x48 and 64x64 pixels. Note that you won't have the possibility of altering them or providing high resolution proportions like 128x128 or 256x256. Another thing that would have benefited the user if it were implemented is the ability to select a portion out of the original picture instead of having to iconize it all. As you probably suspected based on its name, this utility will not work with files that are not BMPs and this is a pity because the majority of digital pictures we encounter and use are in JPG format, with PNG and GIF closely trailing.

With the bitmap loaded and the wanted dimension selected, there are two more steps to follow in order to manufacture your icon. First off, you need to press the big ''Convert'' button and look on the bottom left side of the application for the ''Image converted successfully'' message. If you got the green light, you may go ahead and save the new born icon to a location of your choice.

Yet some other goodness, oddly residing in a lapse of this software, namely in its inability of batch processing, is the virtually inexistent waiting time. The conversion occurs literally in an instant and you can imagine how hard it can be to save a few kilobytes of pure ICO. Undoubtedly, things could have been somewhat different if dozens or hundreds of files were involved.

Still to be tackled on the performance section is the system resource usage and for this application it's safe to call it negligible. Depending on the size of the source file, the amount of RAM put to work can exceed 10 MB, but it barely does so. With regard to the processor usage, the meter recorded a 2 percent usage for less than a second. Overall, it is so lightweight both when idling and operating that you won't even feel its presence.

The Good

The Bad

The Truth

This article is also available in Spanish: Realiza iconos para tus mapas de bits