It is an icon with a.webloc extension. Using 'Get info' I open.webloc files with Safari. So if i click on the icon, safari opens and i go straight to my desired website. The icon image for this quick link is the Safari compass. Is there any way to change this icon to a jpeg or other image of my choice? Thanks in advance, Neil. Find the icon you want to change. Go to the folder that contains the file you'd like to alter. If you want to change an icon on your dock, Control-click and select Options → Show in Finder. You can change the icon of most folders, applications, and documents. Certain special icons cannot be changed this way, including the Finder and Trash icons. Locate the icon for the file whose extension you want to change using the Finder's toolbar, Finder's find command or Spotlight search utility, according to your preference. Step 2 Click the file name beneath the icon twice, more slowly than you would click for a double-click.
| Filename extension | |
|---|---|
| Type code | icns |
| Uniform Type Identifier (UTI) | com.apple.icns |
| Developed by | Apple Inc. |
| Type of format |
- Back in the pre-Mac OS X and macOS days, Apple’s System 9 and earlier relied on hidden metadata to associate files with apps. File extensions, those bits of text that follow a period at the end.
- Icons on the Mac represent everything starting from a file, folder, applications etc. And you might wish to change them at some point. You can go for changing the icon to make it look your way. You can go for changing the icon to make it look your way.
The Apple Icon Image format is the icon format used in Apple Inc.'s macOS. It supports icons of 16 × 16, 32 × 32, 48 × 48, 128 × 128, 256 × 256, 512 × 512 points at 1x and 2x scale, with both 1- and 8-bitalpha channels and multiple image states (example: open and closed folders). The fixed-size icons can be scaled by the operating system and displayed at any intermediate size.
File structure[edit]
The file format consists of an 8 byte header, followed by any number of icons.
Header[edit]
| Offset | Size | Purpose |
|---|---|---|
| 0 | 4 | Magic literal, must be 'icns' (0x69, 0x63, 0x6e, 0x73) |
| 4 | 4 | Length of file, in bytes, msb first |
Icon data[edit]
| Offset | Size | Purpose |
|---|---|---|
| 0 | 4 | Icon type, see OSType below. |
| 4 | 4 | Length of data, in bytes (including type and length), msb first |
| 8 | Variable | Icon data |
Compression[edit]
| lead value | tail bytes | result uncompressed |
|---|---|---|
| 0…127 | 1…128 | 1…128 bytes |
| 128…255 | 1 byte | 3…130 copies |
Over time the format has been improved and there is support for compression of some parts of the pixel data. The 32-bit ('is32', 'il32', 'ih32','it32') and ARGB ('ic04', 'ic05') pixel data are often compressed (per channel) with a format similar to PackBits.[1]Some sources mentioned that the OS supports both compressed or uncompressed data chunks.
The following pseudocode decompresses the data:
Example: 02 01 02 02 80 03 81 04 82 05 should decompress to 01 02 02 03 03 03 04 04 04 04 05 05 05 05 05
Icon types[edit]
| OSType | Length (bytes) | Size (pixels) | Supported OS Version | Description |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| ICON | 128 | 32 | 1.0 | 32×32 1-bit mono icon |
| ICN# | 256 | 32 | 6.0 | 32×32 1-bit mono icon with 1-bit mask |
| icm# | 48 | 16 | 6.0 | 16×12 1 bit mono icon with 1-bit mask |
| icm4 | 96 | 16 | 7.0 | 16×12 4 bit icon |
| icm8 | 192 | 16 | 7.0 | 16×12 8 bit icon |
| ics# | 64 (32 img + 32 mask) | 16 | 6.0 | 16×16 1-bit mask |
| ics4 | 128 | 16 | 7.0 | 16×16 4-bit icon |
| ics8 | 256 | 16 | 7.0 | 16x16 8 bit icon |
| is32 | varies (768) | 16 | 8.5 | 16×16 24-bit icon |
| s8mk | 256 | 16 | 8.5 | 16x16 8-bit mask |
| icl4 | 512 | 32 | 7.0 | 32×32 4-bit icon |
| icl8 | 1,024 | 32 | 7.0 | 32×32 8-bit icon |
| il32 | varies (3,072) | 32 | 8.5 | 32x32 24-bit icon |
| l8mk | 1,024 | 32 | 8.5 | 32×32 8-bit mask |
| ich# | 288 | 48 | 8.5 | 48×48 1-bit mask |
| ich4 | 1,152 | 48 | 8.5 | 48×48 4-bit icon |
| ich8 | 2,304 | 48 | 8.5 | 48×48 8-bit icon |
| ih32 | varies (6,912) | 48 | 8.5 | 48×48 24-bit icon |
| h8mk | 2,304 | 48 | 8.5 | 48×48 8-bit mask |
| it32 | varies (49,152) | 128 | 10.0 | 128×128 24-bit icon |
| t8mk | 16,384 | 128 | 10.0 | 128×128 8-bit mask |
| icp4 | varies | 16 | 10.7 | 16x16 icon in JPEG 2000 or PNG format |
| icp5 | varies | 32 | 10.7 | 32x32 icon in JPEG 2000 or PNG format |
| icp6 | varies | 64 | 10.7 | 64x64 icon in JPEG 2000 or PNG format |
| ic07 | varies | 128 | 10.7 | 128x128 icon in JPEG 2000 or PNG format |
| ic08 | varies | 256 | 10.5 | 256×256 icon in JPEG 2000 or PNG format |
| ic09 | varies | 512 | 10.5 | 512×512 icon in JPEG 2000 or PNG format |
| ic10 | varies | 1024 | 10.7 | 1024×1024 in 10.7 (or 512x512@2x 'retina' in 10.8) icon in JPEG 2000 or PNG format |
| ic11 | varies | 32 | 10.8 | 16x16@2x 'retina' icon in JPEG 2000 or PNG format |
| ic12 | varies | 64 | 10.8 | 32x32@2x 'retina' icon in JPEG 2000 or PNG format |
| ic13 | varies | 256 | 10.8 | 128x128@2x 'retina' icon in JPEG 2000 or PNG format |
| ic14 | varies | 512 | 10.8 | 256x256@2x 'retina' icon in JPEG 2000 or PNG format |
| ic04 | varies | 16 | 16x16 ARGB | |
| ic05 | varies | 32 | 32x32 ARGB | |
| icsB | varies | 36 | 36x36 | |
| icsb | varies | 18 | 18x18 |
- the values inside the brackets () in the length column is the uncompressed length.
- the ARGB format consists of the ascii values for 'ARGB' and the four compressed channels tightly packed
Other types[edit]
| OSType | Length (bytes) | Description |
|---|---|---|
| 'TOC ' | varies | 'Table of Contents' a list of all image types in the file, and their sizes (added in Mac OS X 10.7) |
| 'icnV' | 4 | 4-byte big endian float - equal to the bundle version number of Icon Composer.app that created to icon |
| 'name' | Unknown | |
| 'info' | 259 | Info binary plist. Usage unknown |
Support[edit]
Various image viewers can load *.icns files, and free and open source converters from or to PNG also exist.[2][3]GTK+ can load *.icns resources since 2007.[4] Other tools supporting the format include the Apple Icon Composer and icns Browser, The Iconfactory, and IconBuilder.
MacOS[clarification needed] offers the built-in iconutil command line tool to pack and unpack *.icns files.
External links[edit]
- IconFamily – Open source Objective C class to read and write Apple icns files
- osxiconutils - Command line tools to work with Apple icns files
See also[edit]
- ICO format on Windows
- X PixMap format for X11
References[edit]
- ^Macintosh Icons
- ^'libicns'. SourceForge project icns. 2009. Retrieved August 18, 2016.
- ^'png2icns'. Moin Uddin. 2016. Retrieved May 25, 2017.
- ^Lyonel Vincent (2007). 'Mac OS X icons for GTK+'. Retrieved August 18, 2016.
How To Change Mac Icons
After a few hours of work, a Finder window in icon mode can look something like a teenager’s room: stuff strewn all over the place, as demonstrated with the Applications folder in Figure 1.
Figure 1: Will someone please clean up this mess?
To restore order to your Desktop, click in any open area of the active window and then choose View –> Clean Up. This command leaves the icons in approximately the same position but snaps them to an invisible grid so that they’re aligned, as shown in Figure 2.
Figure 2: Tidying up is no problem with the Clean Up menu command.
After things are in alignment, work with the icon view options. (Naturally, you’ll want the active Finder window in icon view first, so choose View –> As Icons or press COMMAND+1.) From the Finder menu, choose View –> Show View Options — or press that swingin’ COMMAND+J shortcut — to display the View Options dialog box that you see in Figure 3. (Remember that these options are the ones available for icon view.)
Figure 3: The settings available for icon view.
Note these first two radio buttons, which also appear in the list View Options dialog box:
- This Window Only: Select the This Window Only radio button to apply the changes that you make only to the Finder window that opens when you open the selected item — in other words, the item that appears in the window’s title bar.
- For example, any changes made to the settings in Figure 3 will affect only the Applications folder because it was the active Finder window when you pressed COMMAND+ J. (You may have noticed that the window name also appears as the title of the View Options dialog box.)
- All Windows: Select the All Windows radio button to apply the changes that you make to all Finder windows that you view in your current mode.
Of course, Mac OS X remembers the changes that you make within the View Options dialog box, no matter which view mode you’re configuring. You can also make other changes from this dialog box, including
- Resizing your Desktop icons: Click and drag the Icon Size slider to shrink or expand the icons on your Desktop. The icon size is displayed in pixels above the slider.
- Resizing icon label text: Click the up and down arrows to the right of the Text Size drop-down box to choose the font size (in points) for icon labels.
- Moving icon label text: Select either the Bottom (default) or the Right radio button to choose between displaying the text under your Desktop icons or to the right of the icons.
- Snap to Grid: Enable this check box to automatically align icons to a grid within the window, just as if you had used the Clean Up menu command.
- Show Item Info: With this check box enabled, Mac OS X displays the number of items within each folder in the window.
- Show Icon Preview: If you enable this check box, the Finder displays icons for image files using a miniature of the actual picture. (A cool feature for those with digital cameras — however, showing a preview does take extra processing time because Mac OS X has to load each image file and shrink it down to create the icon.)
Change Apple Mac Icon
- Keep Arranged By: To sort the display of icons in a window, enable this check box and choose one of the following criteria from its drop-down list: by name, date modified, date created, size, or item type.
- Choosing a background: To select a background for the window, select one of three radio buttons here:
• White: This is the default.
• Color: Click a color choice from the color block that appears if you make this selection.
• Picture: Select this radio button and then click the Select button to display a standard Open dialog box. Navigate to the location where the desired image is stored, click it once to select it, and then click Open.
After all your changes are made and you’re ready to return to work, click the dialog box’s Close button to save your settings.