Shoutbox

I've been using Plus! since MSN 7.0 (not very long I know), and I thought of one particular features that can be rather interesting.

Since MSN 7.0, we can add custom emoticons simply by rightclicking on the icon. That's a standard feature in the MSN Messenger. But often, I've wanted to save these emoticons (especially animations) into its own separate files so I can keep and back them up.

I've recently went through a system format and I lost over 100 custom emoticons, some of them were quite unique. Of course, I was EXTREMELY sad. Till now I've not manage to recover the ones I liked.

If it is a standard feature to add an icon to our collection, how about making a plus! feature for saving the icon into our computer?

Yes, that would be a useful function. Of course, you could just back up the picture files themselves, but then you would still have to add them back into messenger by hand. For people with large collections, that could be very annoying.

quote:

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Originally posted by Mr. G
Hmmm..... when I want to copy any emoticon which is animated i don't go to the MSN Cache but I print screen several times and i save the emoticons after crop and then I make them animated and it always works for me!

Mr. G

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Well... You can't expect everyone to do that for 100 over emoticons... ^_^;;

Indeed you can't! But you may be able to make a script / separate application that would be capable of it.

Emoticons, just as display pictures used by your contacts are cached and stored already. Simply copy them from there...

For Windows Live Messenger this directory is
%temp%\MessengerCache\

The strangly named files there are all the PNGs and GIFs which WLM has recieved. Browse that directory with a graphics program like PainShopPro which can reconize graphic files (without having the proper extension).

Also read:
CookieRevised's reply to 'Where does MSN store it's stuff?'
and
CookieRevised's reply to 'How do CE/DP stealers work and do I need them?'

quote:

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Originally posted by Mr. G
Hmmm..... when I want to copy any emoticon which is animated i don't go to the MSN Cache but I print screen several times and i save the emoticons after crop and then I make them animated and it always works for me!

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That's not only the most crappy method I heared of and will result in only a bad version of the animation, it also takes waaaaaay longer than simply copying the already existing files.

CookieRevised, thanks for your reply. But I can't seem to install this program Paint Shop Pro... =X

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Hm... a problem I faced!!! I can only save the icons as static...CookieRevised, how can I save them as animations?

quote:

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Originally posted by celestialgal86
CookieRevised, thanks for your reply. But I can't seem to install this program Paint Shop Pro... =X

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I'm sure there are other (free) graphic programs which you could use. I can't name a list which will reconize graphics by their format and not by their extension, but the list would be pretty huge as that is what a good graphics program is suppose to be doing. Maybe you can try Google or wait for somebody else to list some programs.

quote:

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Originally posted by celestialgal86
Hm... a problem I faced!!! I can only save the icons as static...CookieRevised, how can I save them as animations?

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The emoticons and display pictures are saved exactly as your contact has them. This means that animated GIFs (as that is the format in which animated emoticons are saved), will also be saved as animated GIFs. But if you rename that stored cache file with an extension like PNG then it is quite possible that the graphics program you're using doesn't reconize it as a animated, frames containing, GIF.

So you must copy that specific file to the location you which and name it with GIF as extension, instead of PNG which you would use in general.