Create your own thumbnail images

One of the best things about Macs compared to Windows PCs is that the icons are so much better. It’s a small detail but it makes working on a Mac that much more pleasant.

Icon2Image is designed to help you get the best out of your Mac and create thumbnail images in multiple formats that will grace OS X. Icon2Image allows you to create image thumbnails of files, folders and disk icons in just about any image formats. The problem with Icon2Image is that the installation is a little complicated. It’s not just a case of dragging the program icon to your applications folder.

First what you need to do is place the contextual menu plugin in “/Library/Contextual Menu Items/”. You must then place the preference pane in “/Library/PreferencePanes”. You then have to logout and log back in to load the contextual menu which is a bit annoying. Finally, to activate the Icon2Image Demo you need to open the “Password” tab of the Icon2Image System Preference pane to activate this product for the first time.

This rather annoying installation process sets the mood for what it quite an awkward product to use and it does make for easy access via Finder’s context menu. An accompanying system preference pane enables you to configure various options such as the background color or size of the generated images. It gives you a ton of image formats to save in but the overall feeling is one that Icon2Image should have been made much easier for the first time user to run.

Icon2Image can help you create image thumbnails in many different formats but the hassle of installation and operation may put-off first time users.