Make several PNGs into one ICO file [closed]

Question

With Windows ICO files, you can pack several different sized images into the same ICO file - Windows then picks different sizes based on what it needs. (see here for info about icon sizes)

There are lots of free online tools that take a singe image and make it into an ICO file, but are there any free online tools that take several images and make them into one ICO file?

Codon

Answer 1

Turns out you can also do this with Gimp, as described here:

• Open the largest of the icon images in The GIMP. Right-click on the image and select File->Open as Layers... and select all the other icon images.
• This will create a single image with a layer containing each of the other icon images.
• Save the image as a Microsoft Windows Icon (.ico) image - File->Export (or File->Save As in older versions of GIMP), and then type in the filename, e.g. favicon.ico. (this will automatically select the .ico format)

Codon

Great thanks! Effectively, a lot of configuration possible and an excellent output quality compared to other command line tools! – Phosphorous

Answer 2

ICOBundle - Free Program from Telegraphics http://www.telegraphics.com.au/sw/product/ICOBundle

you first create icon files in the required sizes and then combine it with ICOBundle. For the creation of the icon files i use the photoshop plugin http://www.telegraphics.com.au/sw/product/ICOFormat

it is a command line utility but the usage is quite simple

icobundl.exe -o favicon.ico favicon16x16.ico favicon32x32.ico

Dorcia

First icon is the target to which all subsequent will be 'appended'. Ensure 16x16 to at least 256x256 or 512x512 range of images otherwise it will look blurry when the view size doesn't match source size. Also, at the point of doing this the multi-ico file might show blurry results due to caching, verify elsewhere then. – Bans

Answer 3

For creating ico file out of multiple png files one of the best tools is png2ico.

Following are different ways to download and install png2ico

Installing from Source

download latest png2ico source from here and run following commands:

tar xzvf png2ico-src-2002-12-08.tar.gz
cd ./png2ico-src-2002-12-08
./configure
make
sudo make install

OSX

OSX users have the png2ico package directly available trough port. you need to run following command

sudo port install png2ico

Command

After installing png2ico you can run following command to generate required ico file

png2ico myicon.ico icon_16x16.png icon_32x32.png icon_64x64.png icon_128x128.png 

• Note that the ico file has limitation that the maximum size supported is height < 256 pixels and width < 256 pixels.

Ternary