Make a Mac app icon from an image
Drag your artwork into Images by Edmund, choose ICNS from the format menu and press Export. You get one .icns file containing the whole ladder of sizes a Mac expects, each rendered from your original rather than scaled from one another. Start from something square and at least 1024 px across, or from an SVG, which has no size limit at all.
macOS 15 or later. Apple silicon Mac. Version 1.1.0, out 11 October 2026. What’s new.
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Make one right here
Drop a square PNG or an SVG in and get a real .icns back, with all ten entries a Mac expects inside it, including the 64 and 1024 px ones that the converter built into macOS quietly leaves out. It happens in this tab, on your own machine: nothing is uploaded, and no email address is asked for.
PNG or SVG to ICNS, step by step
- Drag in the artworkA square PNG at 1024 px is the usual starting point. An SVG is better still, because a vector can be drawn at every size in the ladder without any loss.
- Choose ICNSNo size to set. The ladder is fixed by the format, so the app writes all ten entries and you do not have to know what they are.
- Press ExportOne .icns comes out, ready to drop into an Xcode project or to set on a folder with Get Info. Every size inside it came from your file directly.
The container is written by hand, because the one built into macOS drops two sizes
The image writer built into macOS cannot write the 64 px and 1024 px entries of an icns file. Ask it for either on its own and it fails outright, which is at least honest. Ask it for a whole ladder including them and it silently leaves those two out while reporting success, which is not: you get a file that looks finished, passes a glance, and is missing precisely the retina sizes a modern Mac reaches for. So the app builds the container itself, writing all ten entries, which is the full ladder Apple's own command line tool produces. Ten entries cover seven distinct sizes, because three of them are named twice over, once plain and once retina. Each entry is rendered from your original image rather than from a resized copy, and if you started from an SVG each one is drawn from the vector at that exact size.
Why not just use a converter website?
Because a site that hands you back a folder of PNGs has done the easy half of this job. Assembling them into a container is the other half, and the tool most people reach for next is a command line one they have to look up every time. One press here gives you the finished .icns with the whole ladder already inside it.
The other consideration is timing. An app icon is the piece of artwork you are least likely to want sitting on a stranger’s server before your app is announced. It is also the one where the output is hardest to check: a bad .icns looks perfectly fine in Finder until the missing size shows up as a blurry patch somewhere.
Questions
What size should my source image be?
Square and at least 1024 px across, because that is the largest entry in the ladder and the app will not scale a bitmap up to fill it. An SVG sidesteps the question entirely, since a vector can be drawn at any size.
Should I start from a PNG or an SVG?
An SVG if you have one. Every size in the ladder is then drawn from the original geometry, which is visibly better at the small end where a resampled bitmap goes muddy. A 1024 px PNG is a perfectly good second choice.
Is this the same as an .icon file from Icon Composer?
No. Icon Composer produces Apple's newer layered format for app icons on recent systems. An .icns is the classic container, still what a lot of tooling expects, and still what you want for setting a custom icon on a folder or a document.
Can I use it for a folder icon?
Yes. Open Get Info on the folder, click the small icon at the top left and paste the image in. Finder wants an icon resource rather than a plain picture, which is exactly what an .icns is.
Other things it does
There is a full list on the Images by Edmund product page, along with what else the app does.
Get Images by Edmund.
Free, and it does the other eight jobs too. Two ways to get it when it lands: the Mac App Store, or straight from here.
macOS 15 or later. Apple silicon Mac. Version 1.1.0, out 11 October 2026. What’s new.