Website Icons on Desktop?

I presume you are talking about the little site icon (called a "favicon") that appears in front of the URL of the site in the address bar. This little touch was invented by Microsoft and was not, of course, standards compliant. But it caught on anyway and pretty soon everyone was doing it. I would guess that since it was their invention they built in to IE the ability to place the favicon, if present, on the address when copied onto the local file system. Safari now supports favicons to the extent of displaying them in the URL and in front of bookmarks. However, if you copy the URL into the file system by dragging the URL onto the desktop you only get the generic weblocation icon. The only way to get a custom icon is to select the file, do GetInfo, select the little bitty generic icon at the top of the GetInfo and paste a new icon onto it. For Yahoo! you are in luck, as they have a nice big favicon.ico--most are only 16x16 pixels and would make crummy file icons, by Yahoo's is 48x48.

So do this:

1. Go to this address:

http://www.yahoo.com/favicon.ico

and drag the icon out of the browser window onto the Desktop.

2. What to do next depends on badly you want to preserve the transparency. The easiest thing is to just double click the icon to open it with Preview, then Copy.

3. Select the URL file on your Desktop, do GetInfo, select the little generic icon at the top, then Paste. You'll get a dinky icon with a black background (remember the thing is only 48x48 pixels, not the standard Mac icon size of 128x128).

There ought to be an easier way to do this--after all the favicon ARE in Safari's cache--but I wasn't able to think of one.
Francine


Francine
Schwieder

Mac OS X icons are able to viewed at many different scales. http://www.resexcellence.com/ somewhere should help you find out what size those icons should be. To change any icon, do a Get Info of it in the Finder, and select its icon. Copy an image from an image editing program of the appropriate size and paste it while the icon is selected in the Get Info window. You can also open a program or document's icon and copy its icon to another document.

Hello valend:

Please do not post the same question in different forums. Everyone here is a volunteer, and having two people address the same issue wastes someone's time.

Barry

The activity window shows you the direct link to favicon if it isn't in the main directory of the website. Go to the Window menu of Safari and select Activity.