I have a TImage in many form which shows the status of the item. It requires status image being changed when it is changed. I do not want to use several instances of the TImage on the form. Instead I would like to use TImageList to store and share them.

Yes, you can. But there are some quirks you have to consider when doing so.

Let’s say you have state images and you have to draw a different one based on the state.

Let’s say you have placed Image list and an Image on your form and populated the list with few state images

var
  MyImageList: TImageList;
  MyImage: TImage;

Canvas

That is probably the easiest case. Lets draw an image on canvas of some control (OwnerDraw situation) and also center it. X, Y are top left corner of the future image and Width is a width of the rectangle we want to center image in.
MyImageIndex is an index of the image in the Image List.

MyImageList.Draw(Canvas, X + Width div 2 - MyImageList.Width div 2, Y, MyImageIndex, dsNormal, itImage);

TImage

Being a little bit more complex, it does require some extra code.

// Make sure that any prior state is cleared.
// If you do not do that with transparency enabled, you would see
// images on top of each other
MyImage.Picture.Bitmap := nil;
// Make sure that transparency pixel in the image is taken
// in consideration
MyImage.Picture.Bitmap.TransparentMode := tmFixed;
MyImage.Picture.Bitmap.TransparentColor := clWhite;
// Load image from the Image list into TImage
MyImageList.GetBitmap(MyImageIndex, MyImage.Picture.Bitmap);

Can I use resource file?

Would you like to keep images in the file?

// Store it once
WriteComponentResFile('MyImageList.dat', MyImageList);
// Use it later
ReadComponentResFile('MyImageList.dat', MyImageList);

Not that difficult after all.