The application takes a set of overlapping photographs of a scene shot from a single camera location and creates a high-resolution panorama incorporating all the source images at full resolution.
The stitched panorama can be saved in a wide variety of file formats, from common formats like JPEG and TIFF to multi-resolution tiled formats like HD View and Deep Zoom, as well as allowing multi-resolution upload to the Microsoft Photosynth site.
[2] It can also be saved to a web page with a zoomable viewer using a third-party template.
As of 2021 the program is no longer available for download from Microsoft[3] though it can be found on various other sources such as Internet Archive.
[4] However, Microsoft ICE currently does not provide any anti-ghosting mechanism, like other panorama stitching programmes do, e.g. the open source programme Hugin (software) and various commercial applications.