XnView Software

Hello.

I have an image that I want to use as an icon (an ICO file). How can I specify which colour to make into a transparent background?

(If necessary, I can create the image as a GIF before saving it as an ICO.)

Thanks in advance.

Mike

Hi Mike!

MikeLewis wrote:(If necessary, I can create the image as a GIF before saving it as an ICO.)

Exactly, that's how it's done. The icon gets assigned the GIF's transparency (if any).

Hi XnTriq,

Thanks for your reply.

The icon gets assigned the GIF's transparency (if any).

OK, so my next question is: How do I assign the GIF's transparency?

Mike

MikeLewis wrote:Thanks for your reply.

You're welcome

• How to make .ico files from .bmp files?
• Save as transparent.GIF
• How to set PNG transparency color?

XnTriq,

OK, let me make sure I understand this right.

I have created a GIF in my picture editor. It has two colours: pale yellow and pale blue. I want the yellow to be transparent.

I open the GIF in XnView. I go to Edit / Edit ColorMap. I see a grid of 256 colours. The closest one to the yellow looks like Index 213.

I close the ColorMap, and go to Tools / Options / Write / GIF. I tick the box "Set transparancy value to palette entry", and enter 213 into the adjacent box.

Finally, I save the GIF as an ICO. The yellow now appears to be transparent.

This seems to work fine, but I just wanted to be sure I understood it right. Is this the recommended way of doing it, or am I missing a shortcut?

Thanks for your patience.

Mike

MikeLewis wrote:Is this the recommended way of doing it, or am I missing a shortcut?

As for now, I'm afraid that's the only way you can add tranparency to icons, cursors, GIFs or PNGs.

• [REQ] Set .ICO Transparency When Saving
• Select transparency, behaviour in fullscreen
• Option for GIF transparency support in preview ...
• @icon sushi - image to icon converter

XnTriq,

I'm afraid that's the only way you can add tranparency to icons, cursors, GIFs or PNGs.

That's fine. It's not a problem. I just wanted to be sure I had got it right.

I've only just started exploring XnView. So far, I am very impressed with its features. But I've still got a lot to learn.

Many thanks for your patient help.

Mike

I think transparent icons show up with black colour in XNV. So it is useful to check them with Firefox when done. It has been mentioned in French section (from what I decipher from web translator).

—> marsh

Hello B. !

- I grouse against this non-display of the transparency for icons since… bhuuuu ! Almost ten years ?

- In the French Thread you are talking of, I requested first a better feature to extract icons from EXEs and other files in the same painting : When you see them in the preview-list they are OK (white background), but when you choose one and get it, it's unusable the most times because that crappy black background !
- Moreover, you can't change and save an icon with a transparent BG, then the black stays and the icon is lost…
- As a minimal workaround, I suggested an option to choose the BG-colour when extracting¦processing *.ICO files…

• Further, I give a trick : make a screen shot of the preview list, and crop the icon you want…
Not handy, but better than black !
- I asked for know what is the difficulty here (if any…). Pierre answered that there no special one, but that many viewers behave the same …
… that is not a satisfactory reply, IMHO…

• From that thread, one can get a small set of samples as various colour-depths to perform tests.
They were there for Pierre especially
- He tells one can use the Win extract feature for the thumbnails, but this is a misundestanding (?), since that doesn't the trick to recover icons like said here at top.
- So, currently the issue remains…
- Aside, there are too issues to display the non-standard icon-sizes in the tool-bar (else than Win sizes 16², 32² etc.), the icons are damaged and don't look nice…
But this is another story…

 FR
Claude
Clo

Marsh,

You wrote:

I think transparent icons show up with black colour in XNV. So it is useful to check them with Firefox when done.

I realise that. I was checking the tranparency by dropping the images on a page with a coloured background in Frontpage.

I've been following XnTriq's advice (see above) re transparency in GIFs. So far, this has worked pretty well. But when I save the GIF as an ICO, I've been getting mixed results.

It's something that it would be nice to see improved in a future version, but right now it's a lot better than anything I've tried before.

Mike