Wikipedia:WikiProject Apple Inc./How to upload icons

This is sort of a wikibooks topic, but here we go!

For these instructions it is recommended that you have Mac OS X v10.4, as it comes with all the appropriate tools to do the job. Preview in Mac OS X v10.3 is not up to the task.

There are 2 ways to go about this, either opening the .icns file itself or copying the icon in the Finder.

1. Get the icon
   • Direct: Find the object who's icon you want. Edit→Copy or ⌘C. Open Preview and make a new file. Whatever is in the clipboard will be put in the new file.
   • Indirect: Right click the application that has the icon and choose Show Package Contents, navigate to the resources folder or wherever the file is and open it.
2. In Preview choose the largest/best image and choose File→Save As…
3. Save the file as PNG with alpha.
4. Upload the icon, tagged as {{non-free computer icon}} or {{game-icon}}.

If the icon is from a pre-OSX application, you may wish to consider optimizing it in an image editor. Converting an older format icon to PNG-8 from PNG-24 should shave off about 1/3 of the file size.

Please do not upload in JPEG (no transparency & has compression artifacts) or GIF (poor compression rate) at all!