Shoutbox

I am definately not a techy and when it comes to computers I got to much peroxide in my brain

someone ( forgot who ) made some really nice display pictures

but the format is ICO, couldn't change it with photoshop since it didn't recognice the ICO format

IrfanView did however let me change it to GIF but then the backgrounds were black instead of white, looked horrible

Someone told me to use windows commander but hell it didn't work there at all

So my question to you is how do I change the format cuz MSN does NOT like this format for its display pictures


Nikita

Simply change the extension manually from .ICO to .BMP and you're done!

I did that in WC just to jpg

and I thought it changed but then I looked and it was still ICO

you have to get windows to show all extensions and then change it to BMP, not JPG.

uhm show all extensions???

what i did was open WC go to the folder

slowly left clicked twice changed the ICO behind the file name to JPG

I also tried it with BMP and it still doesn't work

Am I missing something here?

try IrfanView

I did that and the white backgrouns became black

which was hideous since some of the images had little bit of white leftovers

and cuz of that with a black background the quality became poorly

You can't change any icon-file-extension to BMP and expect it to work. For some icons this will work, for most icons, it will not. It only works for icons if they don't consist of multiple formats (an icon can hold different formats for different resolutions and colordepths) and if the format doesn't use transparency (because BMP's do not support any form of transparency)...

What you need is a simple (but good) icon-editor that can open multiple-format and/or transparency-enabled icons, and that can save to GIF, JPG, PNG, etc...

The best thing to save an high-resolution icon with transparency to is PNG, because that is the only format that fully supports alpha transparencies. PNG can be opened and edited further in a normal graphics program like PaintShopPro, PhotoShop, etc...

A very good icon-editor is:
IconXP

It can import ICO (all possible subformats of course), ICPR, BMP, JPEG, ANI, CUR, GIF, PNG, WMF, XPM, XBM, WBMP and Adobe Photoshop PSD. It can export to ICO, ICPR, BMP, JPEG, CUR, PNG, GIF, RC, XPM, XBM, WBMP and Adobe Photoshop PSD files. The UI is very intituive (unlike IrfanView) and it runs on all Windows systems...

This is a highly recommended program, one of the best in it's kind, but it is shareware (30-day trial period), but it's worth it's price more then enough.

Of course you can find similar tools all over the net. And if it is only to convert some ico's to png's, then you proberly can find some other (but less "user-friendly" but working) alternatives... But make sure the application you use supports high resolution icons with alpha transparency




btw, IrfanView isn't your best first choice, although it can open mutliple-format icons, the handling of them is very dodgy and very complicated (many mouseclicks and actions and understanding to do something) but it is free...

thanks a bunch

i downloaded it and its extremely easy to use

i doubt i will be using it often so the free trial wil be fine for now

thanks a bunch