DIY desktop icons with IrfanView #blogjune

No fuss, no bother,

IrfanView quickly converts my .jpg images to .ico ; giving me visually meaningful desktop icons.

Recently I became interested in customising my desktop icons. Specifically (so far): shortcuts to webpages which otherwise would, by default, show the browser's icon. Regular readers may recall that Mr 17 helpfully photoshopped two creative commons images into one; and that it was only after much fuss I found an online converter [no longer available (2020)] to achieve an .ico file.

... and more (later)...

Apparently IrfanView is capable of tons more than this little thing I needed.  It will come in handy:

• when I have time to learn about optimising (beyond cropping and resizing images with Paint to 500px or less before uploading)
• or for working with layers? (see if I can stretch beyond the gimp tutorials with which I made a couple of textures for SecondLife).

How simple?

For future reference, with IrfanView icons are a simple matter of:

File, Save Picture As, .ico [and Discovered 25/12/2020: Both ico options checked]

Thanks Irfan.

Will he earn a place on my toolbar?
[Update 25/12/2020 - he did :-D]

---

Part of my Wordpress→Blogger journey, this post copied 25/12/2020 in republication of my 17 June 2015 post at my experimental self-hosted Wordpress

Sons are useful for... making icons

Or: Mothers and sons learn together

Can I?...

My calendar is in Google calendar. A shortcut on my desktop lets me open it in Chrome with one click.  Of course, then I decided I wanted a special calendar icon for it.  I wanted a calendar in the middle of a chrome icon. Yes a calendar icon would have been simpler but I had a notion of it needing to look similar to the shortcut I have at work.

Would you?

This is where my digital-media-trained and his Photoshop skillz comes in.

That's great but ...

Unfortunately his beautiful combinations looked fine in photoshop, but the first opened at my end with a black background, another had a white background, and when we tried to save as .ico in bmp or png formats (because Photoshop CC did not seem to be able to save to .ico) some showed no image at all.

Trial and error

Some of the clues we tried:

• Ryan at StackExchange suggested that we must first save the .png files to the computer, and then open them with Photoshop (during copy paste techniques Photoshop converts the transparency to black).
• Although my issue does not involve WordPress as did Mike Lee's 2012 issue with the black turning up when he resized images, I wondered from his problem statement whether I might eliminate resizing as a possible cause by using images that were already the desired size. That appeared to help, but we were working through ideas so quickly I am not sure if it was required, because for the one below Mr 17 did resize one of the source images.  I'd have preferred a blue calendar, but could not find one the right size licenced for reuse.

Image (pre-iconised) I use for shortcut to Calendar in Chrome

• The file format issue was the last problem, [which was solved by a webtool which has since (by 2020) been 'deprecated' - I would now use IrfanView or icoconvert.com].

Source images are from Wikipedia: (Calendar) and (Chrome).

---

Part of my Wordpress→Blogger journey, this post copied 25/12/2020 in republication of my 2 June 2015 post at my experimental self-hosted Wordpress

---