Windows application icon in Qt Creator

In an earlier post I described how to add icons to a Qt application using Qt Creator. With the procedure described there, the application shows the icon in the window title bar and on the taskbar. However, when you browse to the folder containing the application in windows, the executable will not be shown with the icon. The same is true when you create a shortcut to the executable (windows will also say that the executable does not contain an icon).

As described here, there is a simple windows specific method to add an application icon that will change the appearance of the executable when browsing under windows (and when creating a shortcut to the executable). You must first create a windows specific resource file which has the extension .rc e.g. myapp.rc. This simple text file then needs to contain the (single) line:

IDI_ICON1 ICON DISCARDABLE "images/myapp.ico"

The final step is then to add this resource file in the Qt project (.pro) file:

RC_FILE = myapp.rc

This works for me when I put the myapp.rc in the same folder as where the Qt project file is located (and that contains the images folder). I did not try any other file locations.