When an engine or a wagon has been added, it can happen that the image you like to use is not available by default in TC. Luckily there is an option to import our own images, although it is not as easy as simply uploading a jpg or bmp file. The image has to be converted to a special TC format. The program needed for the conversion is called TrainAnimator. It is available for free at the TC website: http://freiwald.com/pages/download.htm.
A paid version of the program is also available. It includes a database with some 2000 images, ready for use. But of course … to us hobbyists it is more fun to create our own images!
The process starts with a nice image of our engine. We could make it ourselves with a digicam, or we could try to find one on the Internet. Chances are that a nice image is already available there. A website with thousands of loco images is: http://pc.pxtr.de/stocke.htm
The video shows how to go about with the TrainAnimator program. The ‘trick’ is to start off with an image that is not too large, or you may end up with much too big a file size for just some small TC loco icons.
The ‘magic number’ is an image height of 48 pixels.
TrainAnimator has some built in functionality to crop an image, but no resize. It can be worthwhile to first use an external editor to prepare the image. But not everyone has Photoshop installed, or knows how to use it. Not to worry … some very good image editors are available for free.
One option is to use a web based editor like e.g https://pixlr.com
Another option is to download one of the many free image editors that are available. I use Photoshop for the more intricate work, but for just some fast and easy editing I prefer FastStone: http://www.faststone.org
When the image is cropped and resized to 48 pixels height, we can load it into TrainAnimator. The crop sliders are not needed now, since our image is has a perfect fit. All that may be needed to do is to make the surroundings of the engine or car transparent, such that the image icons look good on a light as well as on a dark background. The available previews show the result of your work.
rudysmodelrailway 
Hi rudy
I have done some testing on this and found the the images that are downloaded from pc.xctr if left as they are are much smaller than if you use faststone to convert to 48 pixels.
Regards
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Posted by Andy | November 6, 2016, 16:34Hi Rudy
I have been doing some testing regarding file sizes, I have found that when you download an image from pc.pxtr and the image is not 48 pixels and you change it in faststone to 48 pixels then import into animator the file size incresses after saving in animator regardless if the original image is bigger or smaller as opposed to just downloading and directly importing into animator the file size is smaller. so it seems not to change such images.
I have also found file sizes from 100kb to 30 Kb so be intresting to see how this affects things
regards
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Posted by andy | November 6, 2016, 12:40hi
great video, you talk about the file size being large with some users. your file size you import into train animator is 3kb but what was the final file size once converted for train animator. I have followed your steps and started with a file size of 4kb but ended up with one at 50kb so im not sure what is happening
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Posted by andy | September 30, 2016, 17:54Some files were in the order of magnitude of MBytes. I’d say 50k is ok. I don’t inow what the program does nut is sure seems it adds stuff which makes files bigger than they need to be. But if you start small, the end result is acdeptable.
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Posted by RudyB | September 30, 2016, 18:38thanks for the quick reply, strange thing is when I took a photo like your demo video and converted it I ended up with a file about 20kb even following the same steps, what concerns me having a very large layout with about 100 blocks so far what impact would all these loco pictures moving in the blocks will have on program speed
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Posted by andy | September 30, 2016, 19:04Yes, that’s exactly why we would want to keep them small. I don’t know what causes the effect you see, but if they’d be below 50k I’d say you’r ok, if you have 100 engines that’s 5MB in total, you’r PC memory can handle that fast.
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Posted by RudyB | October 1, 2016, 06:58I have in the region about 200 locos, but obviously they won’t all be in use at the same time but as they will be in the engine roster in traincontroller I would assume as the ones not in use would not have any affect on the speed of traincontroller
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Posted by Andy | October 1, 2016, 08:46hi rudy
I have downloaded images from pc.pxtr and have found that if you adjust to a 48 pixle size in faststone that you end up with a larger file size than if you don’t edit the image and just directly use in animator
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Posted by andy | November 6, 2016, 18:37