Icon editor recommendations

[JonathanB]

I would like to create some favicons (the icons that show up in the address bar and when you bookmark a site) for the web sites I run. So far I've created two with Photoshop. I understand I need to save them as icon files, but I don't have an icon editor.

Is there a nice icon editor out there that can import gif or bmp files? A freeware one would be great.

[Vin DSL]

You can forget about rolling your own. Favicons are sh!tty little boogers. You have to do everything just exactly right, or they won't work.

What you need to do is get an 'ICO editor.' There are a zillion of them out there, but I (still) like good ol' IconEdit32, and it's free. Do a search on Google and you will find lots of places to download it...

[Vin DSL]

I was just surfing around to make sure IconEdit32 is still available, and I ran across a nice tutorial.

http://www.northcode.com/swfstudio/tutorials/iconedit/

You might want to read this before making a favicon. IconEdit32 is a little 'old school' and kludgey when you first try using it.

BTW, I made the favicon on my site using IconEdit32 - not that's it's anything special. I just bring this up for the sake of conversation...

[Vin DSL]

Um... one more thing and I'll leave you alone. You might want to check out this thread:

http://forums.jaguarpc.com/showthrea...&threadid=9501

[JonathanB]

Thanks for the advice Vin.

IconEdit32 doesn't look too bad. After a little googling I did find some programs out there that will convert graphic files to icon files. Which I can then edit with IconEdit32.

You're right, those favicons sure can be nasty little buggers to work with. Especially limiting yourself to 16 colors.

[JonathanB]

Well, I guess I should have googled more before I started this thread.

After doing some more searching I discovered a nice little program called Clic. If anyone else is interested you can find it at: http://www.blaiz.net/clic.html.

What's really cool is its screen capture feature. So, you can create the graphic in any graphic program, then use Clic's screen capture to import it. Then all it takes is a click on the save button, and viola!

[Vin DSL]

There you go! Like I said, there are a zillion of them out there...