Phone Image Designer

  • Article

Windows Phone Image Designer (ImageDesigner.exe) is a desktop application that you can use to easily:

  • Create a new Windows Phone image.

  • Modify a Windows Phone image that was previously created using Phone Image Designer.

  • Customize the phone image according to your desired user experience, or to meet network or market requirements.

  • Define runtime configurations for your image based on the SIM inserted in the phone.

  • Build and flash the image to your phone.

Phone Image Designer makes it easy for you to create and flash a customized Windows Phone image. Phone Image Designer also provides error logging to help aid error detection and provides basic image-level validation against the feature manifest.

Prerequisites

Installation prerequisites

Before you can use Phone Image Designer, make sure you have installed all of the required software. For more information, see Preparing for Windows Phone development.

BSP prerequisites

Phone Image Designer requires config data (BSP.config.xml) before it can be used to create an OS image. You can:

  • Use the BSP.config.xml file you downloaded as part of the BSP kit, or,

  • Generate your own BSP.config.xml by running the BSP kit configuration tools from the SoC vendor and selecting your component drivers.

Launching Phone Image Designer

To launch Phone Image Designer

  • Use the PhoneImageDesigner.bat file found in the %WPDKCONTENTROOT% directory to launch Phone Image Designer.

- or -

  1. Navigate to the %WPDKCONTENTROOT%\Tools\bin\i386 directory.

  2. Locate ImageDesigner.exe and click to launch Phone Image Designer.

Getting started

To create, modify, or flash an image

  1. On the Getting started screen, select the action that you want to perform:

    • Create a new Windows Phone image - Select this option if this is the first time you're creating an OS image or if you want to create a new OS image from scratch. For more information, see Phone image designer: Setup.

    • Modify a Windows Phone image - Select this option if you've previously created an OS image using Phone Image Designer and want to modify it, or if you want to continue working with an existing image created with Phone Image Designer. This option allows you to select additional languages or change one or more customizations without having to start from the beginning. Select this option if you want to create another variant that is similar to an image that you've previously created. For more information, see Phone image designer: Modify.

    • Flash a Windows Phone image onto your phone - Select this option if you already have an OS image or previously built FFU that's configured according to your needs. This option will walk you through the steps of flashing the OS image or FFU to your phone so you can see what it looks like. For more information, see Phone image designer: Flash.

  2. After you have made a selection, click Next.

Tips and tricks

Try out these tips and tricks to get the most out of using Phone Image Designer.

  • Change the default UI language

  • View context-sensitive help

  • Start over

  • Save your work

  • Resume work on a saved project

Change the default UI language

Phone Image Designer is available in English and Simplified Chinese. If you want to change the language, click the Language button at the upper right-hand corner of the window to switch to English or Simplified Chinese.

The following screenshot shows the Select the image type screen after the default UI language for Phone Image Designer was changed to Simplified Chinese.

View context-sensitive help

When using Phone Image Designer, you can get context-sensitive information about each step pressing the F1 key or clicking the ? icon in the upper-right corner.

When you click ? or press F1, the relevant topic within the Windows Phone Partner Documentation will be shown.

Start over

If you want to stop what you are doing and start over at any point during the setup, image creation or modification, image customization, image build, or image flashing process, click Start over. This will stop Phone Image Designer and take you back to the Getting started screen. Any changes or modifications you've made will not be saved so click the button with caution.

Save your work

If you want to save your work at any point during the setup, image modification, image configuration, and image customization phase, just click Save. Phone Image Designer will save your progress and you have the option to continue right after saving, resume at a later time or start another project.

Resume work on a saved project

If you have a previously saved Phone Image Designer project, you can resume working on the saved project by locating the project directory name and related configuration file.

  1. In Getting started, select Modify a Windows Phone image.

  2. Verify the location of the project file and change it to point to your previously saved project, if necessary.

  3. Proceed with modifying and configuring your image.

Troubleshooting

Because Phone Image Designer is essentially a GUI layer for the Windows Phone command-line tools for creating packages, building and flashing a custom OS image, and so on, you may encounter some warnings and errors when using Phone Image Designer. In general, warnings are not fatal and you can still proceed with building your OS image without any issues. However, for issues that persist and prevent you from completing your task, see the following topics for tips on how to troubleshoot and fix some of these issues:

 

 

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