Ugh, that's the second time this week that, after spending some time on a problem, I hit upon the answer seconds after hitting the submit button

The solution is, generate the file as a header file, then include that wherever you want to use the images. Then call the

Qt Code:
  1. uic_findImage( "imagename.extention" )
To copy to clipboard, switch view to plain text mode 
which will return a QImage. You can use that in your application then.

For some strange reason the normally excellent Qt documentation hardly documented this function at all...