Tip: Use Preview for icon suites
We posted recently about Preview’s support for animated gifs, but a recent tip on Smoking Apples points out that Preview also supports icon suites, also known as Finder icons.
Before you can get it into Preview, you have to copy the icon suite onto your clipboard from the Finder:
1. Select the file in the Finder and choose Get Info from the File menu.
2. Click on the icon in the upper-left corner (see picture) of the Get Info window.
3. Choose Copy from the Edit menu.
The icon suite is now on your clipboard. (They’re called icon suites, by the way, because multiple copies of the icon are packaged into a suite to allow the icon to be drawn in a range of sizes from very small [16x16] to very large [512x512] without needing to be stretched or squished unattractively.)
Now launch Preview and choose New From Clipboard from the File menu. You’ll see a new window appear containing the icon suite with several versions of the icon at various sizes:
Preview’s support for icon suites, while appreciated, needs considerable refinement and actually appears to be built on its already rough-edged support for animated gifs: the icons within the suite are named as though frames in a series, they’re shown with the Aperture-style numbered stack icon, and they default when saved to a file type of GIF. Saving the file then reopening it in Preview doesn’t look very nice.
Nice to know, though. Who knew Preview was hiding so much functionality?
Oh, and as you’d expect given the many other examples of Core Animation at work within Preview, clicking the Aperture-style stack icon to expand the stack animates out very nicely.