Making icons

File extention?

[Adam5000]

I'm working on my web site and the subject has turned to icons. I've got an icon on my desktop linking to the home page of the site, but the picture is just a piece of paper with a blue e on it and not very descriptive.

So I thought maybe I could switch the paper and blue e with something else for example a picture of a dog (Adam's dictionary of dogs). But I don't think I can use a standard Jpeg or Gif image. Do icon files need to be created in a special way?

Help!

[thecoalman]

You need favicon.ico file in your root directory. Most browsers will look for it there. You could also specifiy between the head tags in your page :

<link rel="shortcut icon" href="/favicon.ico">

It's a specific format, however there are a lot of online tools for converting common image types to .ico if you don't have image software that supports it.

[limbo]

Even easier than converting via 3rd party software; using windows (not sure about macs) you can simply rename GIF's with the .ico extension.

The Coalman has covered the rest. One thing to add - if you use absolute ref your favicon will show up more consistently in IE.

[thecoalman]

Changing the extension might work but just like changing the extension on a animated .gif to .jpg it's not really a animated .jpg

That really works BTW. At the very least I know IE6 will display it ;)

[rocknbil]

A proper .ico file is actually a two-layer file consisting of a 32x32 pixel indexed color image and a 16x16 pixel indexed color image. They can be transparent or not. Depending on where it's deployed, the appropriate one will display (32 for desktop, 16 for in-folder, 16 for address bar, 32 for bookmarks, I think.)

png2ico is a command line app for this, it's free and easy. You create the two images, save them as .png, then run the program via command line/DOS: png2ico favicon.ico file1.png file32.png [press enter]. It's a snap, make sure to make a donation when you download it, this is one of the gold nuggets of the Internet. :-)

[jbinbpt]

irfanview will save in .ico format

[coopster]

Another option, from MS ...
[msdn2.microsoft.com...]