Big Free PNG Icons for your Dock or Desktop!

21/08/2007 UPDATE: added some nice png icons 😉

In this post I’ll simply update a number of Free Big PNG Icons that you can download and use for any of your application 🙂

This icons comes either free from Open Source Applications or inspired by proprietary software… but still free because the authors wished them to be free icons. So you can download them without any worry and please feel free to use this gorgeous icons with a Dock or for your desktop, in Ubuntu, for example: The Desktop drwawed by Nautilus lets you choose even the size of each icon! And sicne this are Huge icons, you can have a really gorgeous desktop using them.

As for the docks, I suggest you, assuming you’re using Linux, KXDocker, Cooldock, Kiba Dock and so on. I don’t recommend Avant Windows Navigator because, untill now, it doesn’t et you resize the icons, reducing its funcionality to a mere simple launcher and taskbar…

A number of this icons are taken from OSX free applications. In Mac OSX they had to design Big wonderfull icons for each program, since this is the Mac Aqua stile. The problem was that in OSX the icons are stored in a .icns file format, while we need a .png: the strange fact is that since one or two months ago, I’m sure that all the icons where .png in OSX too since I copyed them and used them under Linux with no problem.

To extract a png icon from a Mac OSX Application (Assuming you can use Mac OSX on some mac computer), find a Mac Apllication, usually OSX apps are located into the Applictions folder; right click on a .app application, choose to View Package Content (I’m an Italian Mac user, the meaning of this option is correct, however, the exact translation may be dirrerent since I use OSX in ITA) and a new finder window will open. From there, enter the folder Contents –> Resources and there you’ll find the Icon used to show the .app Application!

Very likely, this icon will be a .icns file. OSX Can open this kind of files but nor photoshop nor any other picture handling tool I could find around wa able to open and modify this files. So we have to convert it to a .png file. To do it, we’ll need the OSX Console (Very similar to the Linux one). You can find the console application into the Applications –> Utilityes folder.

Use the following command to convert (as an example) an ICNS file to a png image file:
sips -s format png /Path/To/Icon.icns --out /Path/To/ConvertedImage.png
The command above would convert an ICNS file named Icon.icns to a png file named ConvertedImage.png. To convert to other image file formats, simply replace the portion of the command that reads png with the file format of your liking. You can choose from these possible formats: jpeg, tiff, png, gif, jp2, pict, bmp, qtif, psd, sgi, and tga.

You can also choose to use the command from inside the folder where the .icns files are stored. That’s why i suggest you to Copy-Paste where you like a certain number of .icns files before converting them. Then, from the console, enter into this dir with a very simple command like this:

cd /Path/ToIcons/

Naturally, that’s an example. If you don’t know exaclty how you should write down the path where you stored your icons, simply write in the console a simple:

cd

Then type a space and drag and drop the folder where the icons are stored into the console window. The path to that folder will appear auomatically. This trick works in Linux too if you didn’t know. Now press enter and you’ll be into the path where your .icns icons are stored! Give this command:

sips -s format png ./Icon.icns --out ./ConvertedImage.png

For each icon, using the proper file name for every icon, of course. Ah, in a console, after giving a command, if you press the up arrow, the previous command entered appears, so, this is kinda an automated task. Boring if you’ve got a lot of icons like me but automated and simple 🙂

So, Enjoy my hard work for bringing you all of this Png icons and here are the Icons! You can choose to download the periodically updated package rather then download each icon aside. Here’s the Package.