Icons on the mac

I had to snatch a number of icons for different file types from the jaws of my OS X. To spare others the detective work, here’s how.

As Mac developers will probably know (but I didn’t) is that icons are stored in files named *.icns, so locate icns produced a long list which can be combed through for interesting icons to use. Getting from the icns format to something usable on the web like GIF or PNG turned out to be a little tricky, but thankfully the little Iconverter software does the trick.

But then there were the MS Office icons—there were on icns files to be found for these. I never did manage to find out where they store them, but luckily I found this other software called IconGrabber that lets you pluck the icon straight from a file that bears it.

ImageMagick’s convert took it from there.