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I've asked a similar question in the designer forum, but now I realize a more general question might also be useful. This is not the same question, it's an extension in general.

What ways are available to embed or import graphics into a Qt project (I'm using Qt 4) which allow the end product to not require external graphics files? I've seen simple bitmaps turned into arrays and included as a header file, but usually for very simple things like cursor shapes. Suppose I have a large, complicated graphic image, maybe a png or jpg, and I want to somehow permanently and statically embed it into an application...I'd have to serialize this and turn it into a data structure. Images which are compressed greatly complicate this. Is there some utility or general scheme to compile in images and make them available as a serialized data structure, rather than an outside file that has to be shipped with each project?

Note: I'm starting with png or jpg or other formats which can be exported by Gimp.

I guess I answered my own question, the Qt resource system does this!

You pretend the resource is a file but you use a colon ':' leading the file path name. So if you had file images/icon.png, you'd do QIcon(":/images/icon.png"). Then it understands it's the internally stored version.