How to make 24 BIT PNG icons

[Seblington]

Hello All, I have been playing with icons, loading pictures like JPEGS on an Amiga 68K is slow, even with the vampire but loading icons is much quicker making it easy to view pictures before clicking on them to make the high res version.

I came across an application called Image2Icon, it converts a picture into an icon for that picture with a thumbnail effect. The only issue is this program only does 256 colour and looks terrible (Picture on the right)

If you right click and go to information you can change one of the tooltypes first line to File=V42 which if I have read properly should make a 24 bit icon, though the quality improves its only by a very little.

I did however manage to make a 24bit PNG work as you can see on the right but the process was very long winded

On the PC Make a copy of the picture
Convert to PNG
resize to 128 pixels
rename the file to NAME.info

Copy over to my A500 The icon shows but is very slow and does not open so;

Right click on iton and go to information
Right click whilst in information and switch to "project"
Under Icon tab put the default tool as Sys:utilities/multiview then save


Once this is done, load time is much quicker (AS WB converts it to a proper icon) and the results are great but the downside is its rather time consuming and long winded.

Am I using Image2Icon correctly, is there a better way?

[PeterK]

Originally Posted by Seblington

On the PC Make a copy of the picture
Convert to PNG
resize to 128 pixels
rename the file to NAME.info

Copy over to my A500 The icon shows but is very slow and does not open so;

Right click on icon and go to information
Right click whilst in information and switch to "project"
Under Icon tab put the default tool as Sys:utilities/multiview then save


Once this is done, load time is much quicker (AS WB converts it to a proper icon) and the results are great but the downside is its rather time consuming and long winded.

This procedure is correct, if you use my icon.library for displaying and converting the PNG icons. For best quality download the latest version from Aminet.

Image2Icon is an old program and I don't know how good that works.

If you don't want to spend any time on creating icons by yourself, you could also try the tool Eastern from Stephan Rupprecht which is able to convert images on the fly into preview thumbnail icons, but that needs a fast CPU, of course. You just have to put Eastern into your WBStartup drawer and adjust the tooltype settings for your needs, like SQ=BEST, DQ=BEST, MDP=256, DT=your picture viewer, and the image size (I use only MH=80).

http://aminet.net/package/util/wb/eastern

[Seblington]

Thanks Peter, though I have a good card the Vampire it would be too slow to do it on the fly, shame really because thats exactly what I would love it to do. I did however find a suitable solution, a cool program called iBatch

http://www.geobiz.de/ibatch/ibatch.html

It uses image2Icon but renders the image to a OS4 PNG truecolur, it works very well and is quite quick too, you do need the following though

C:Image2icon (drop a copy of the program into the C folder)
LIBS:Wizard.library
LIBS:jped.library
LIBS:Zlib.library

all available on his site.

[AMIGASYSTEM]

You can create icons PNG (DualPNG) in a simple and fast way joining two images PNG (same size), with two different tools see my video tutorial

[ Show youtube player ]

[PeterK]

Originally Posted by Seblington

I did however find a suitable solution, a cool program called iBatch
http://www.geobiz.de/ibatch/ibatch.html

Thank you Seblington, that's a good find.

I didn't know that iBatch tool, and it even works on OS 3.x. Many Amiga users will like that.

[Seblington]

Yea, there is also image2icon-capsule, select a folder and your output size, format and quality, very cool tool, good results too, the installer doesn't work but it isn't complicated to just drop it in a folder somewhere. It seems to use Image2Icon and does set the icons to 24 bit so I think when I tried I must have messed up the settings.

[Seblington]

Originally Posted by AMIGASYSTEM

You can create icons PNG (DualPNG) in a simple and fast way joining two images PNG (same size), with two different tools see my video tutorial

[ Show youtube player ]

Many thanks, does look usefull too.

[PeterK]

Originally Posted by Seblington

It seems to use Image2Icon and does set the icons to 24 bit so I think when I tried I must have messed up the settings.

If Image2Icon creates OS4 icons you can watch them in 24 bit quality with AfA_OS, Scalos or OS4. But on OS 3.x with my icon.library installed these icons are automatically converted to 256 colors when they are displayed. You can simply check that by selecting one of these icons: in case that it gets a yellow glowing effect then it's displayed by my library in 256 colors. The OS 3.5 icon format is not written to the icon files until you use Icon Information to save them. The quality will remain the same as what you can see already, but the loading of these icons would be much faster after converting the files as you've noticed already with the PNG icons before. And the file sizes will become much smaller. The limitation to 256 colors does not mean 8-bit colors, these colors are all using 15 bits.

Update: I didn't know that i2iGUI-V2 converts all icons immediately. The 2. image is replaced by icon.library since 46.4.484 by a darker copy of the 1. image with a yellow/orange glow effect.

Btw, the lovely dog looks a bit evil now!

[Seblington]

Hello and thanks for that info, yes that certainly makes sense when I was using PNG images renamed to .info, they took forever to load until I either snapshot the icons or edited the info type.

Thanks for the comments on my dog BTW, He is insane, bouncy and very affectionate, but not evil :-P

[PeterK]

Originally Posted by Seblington

Thanks for the comments on my dog BTW, He is insane, bouncy and very affectionate, but not evil :-P

Are you sure?

[Sinphaltimus]

SplitterJoiner FTW! Holycow, I wasted so much time trying to get this basic function out of Iconian with no good results. And after watching that video, I've got the icon I wanted for my SMBFS share. Thank you! - I can see myself making a ton of new icons now....

[Retrofan]

Originally Posted by AMIGASYSTEM

You can create icons PNG (DualPNG) in a simple and fast way joining two images PNG (same size), with two different tools see my video tutorial

[ Show youtube player ]

LOL. I've always been using the Join command and I didn't know that JoinSplitter (that I've got) was also for that

It works the same way.

[PeterK]

Icon.library now replaces the second image of any preview icon that is generated by Image2Icon with a darker copy of the first image and a glowing effect. I didn't like the second images as they were created by Image2Icon-Capsule, a GUI for Image2Icon (i2iGUI-V2).
http://aminet.net/package/util/wb/i2iGUI-V2