What is the size of the icons in the system tray? [duplicate]

Question

I want to change the notification icon of my application but don't know what is the size so as to make it properly displayed. Currently it is automatically resized and break my pixels! Please help!

Colombo

Answer 1

It's 16x16. If you create a .ico file that supports 16, 32, 48 and 256 sizes, you're covered.

Calabro

Can you explain how to do this? – Arrear

basically you create a .ico at 256x256 and it will be scale down automatically by the OS – Antetype

icon sushi is a free tool to create .ico files from appropriate pngs. Add them in order of size, 256, 48, 32, 16. – Stefan

Answer 2

In fact the size of the icon will vary according to the system DPI.

WPF exposes the recommended pixel width and height of small icons with SystemParameters.SmallIconWidth and SystemParameters.SmallIconHeight. (WinForms exposes the equivalent SystemInformation.SmallIconSize - both just wrap around GetSystemMetrics and SM_CXSMICON/SM_CYSMICON.)

Microsoft recommends including 16x16 and 32x32 pixel icons.

Beaming

Good info. I made a hand-drawn 16x16 icon, with "sharp" edges (no aliasing) and it doesn't really look right in my system tray. It's just barely shrinking it, probably by 2 to 4 pixels. Not sure there's any solving this, except to add some aliasing. – Orleans

After changing dpi I still get the same (16). My question. – Architectonic

Answer 3

For XP it's 16 x 16

Curium

Answer 4

In ubuntu (unity) it seems to be 24x24 px.

Brogle

Answer 5

Windows 7 has 16*16 pixels icons in system tray.

Saturninasaturnine

Answer 6

Outlook has an 16*16 pixels icon.

Solorio

Answer 7

I believe it has always been 16x16, but at some point between 98 and XP (Maybe it was CE vs NT?) they learned to support full color and alpha transparency. If you can, try to include a 256 color palleted version in the ICO for safe mode if not older versions of Windows.

Fianna