CODEWITHSUNDEEP
visual-studio-2010icons
Grant Birchmeier
Grant Birchmeier

Reputation: 18484

Does Visual Studio 2010 let you edit icons?

When I double click on a .ico file in Visual Studio 2010 (Professional), it opens what looks like an icon editor. It looks like it should be really easy to pick a color from the left and edit pixels.

But my mouse is a magnifying glass icon. Left click, right click, all they do is toggle zoom on the icon. I can't figure out how to do anything useful.

Am I missing something obvious? Is this icon view as useless as it seems?

Upvotes: 36

Views: 45684

Answers (8)

RickJansen
RickJansen

Reputation: 1713

Visual Studio 2022 (available free) has an icon editor built in. Just in case you end up here because you tried to insert a colourful image into a a 256x256 24 bit icon and your colours get messed up: in the editor toolbar on the top right there is a selector for opaque/transparent background, but only when you have a rectangle- or irregular area selection tool active. Default backgroundis set to transparent, you need to set it to opaque to retain your image. (There's a special colour for transparency; though my image does not contain that the colours were wrong)

Upvotes: 0

Bishoy Hanna
Bishoy Hanna

Reputation: 4589

I finally found an easy way to do it without visual studio, GIMP https://www.gimp.org/downloads/

Upvotes: 0

mitaka
mitaka

Reputation: 2189

For the PNG images used as button icons that Visual Studio cannot edit you can use external editor as MS Paint.

  • open PNG in Visual Studio 2010
  • right click on the white canvas -> Open External Editor

enter image description here

Upvotes: 4

Mike Laursen
Mike Laursen

Reputation: 21

If you have a Mac OS X machine around, you can edit Windows icons with the Icon Composer application included with the free Developer Tools.

I just discovered this accidentally while working on some cross-platform Mac/Windows code.

Upvotes: 2

hoang
hoang

Reputation: 1917

You can't directly edit 32-bit color icons but you can convert them manually to 24-bit :

Right click > Add new icon

Open your Icon1.ico file.

Right click > New Image Type or press Ins to open the New Icon Image Type dialog.

Select the format you want, say 96x96, 24 bit or add any custom size and color depth.

Then copy/paste from your 32-bit icon file and save.

Et voilà ! You can now edit your 24-bit color icon.

Upvotes: 27

Grant Birchmeier
Grant Birchmeier

Reputation: 18484

Doh! I needed to enable View -> Toolbars -> Image Editor.

Thanks to @detale.

Upvotes: 18

detale
detale

Reputation: 12892

The icon is built by an external app.

For Visual Studio 2008 & 2010 image editor,
"Using the Image Editor, you can view 32-bit images, but you cannot edit them."

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/s1dadd79.aspx

Upvotes: 7

SLaks
SLaks

Reputation: 887275

Visual Studio can edit icons, but not 24-bit color icons.

Upvotes: 2

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