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Topic: Album art as folder icon (Read 9905 times) previous topic - next topic
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Album art as folder icon

I have a artist-album.jpg cover art scan in each of my album directories ( /artist/album ). I would like to find a way to easily make a copy of each of these jpgs in ico format and automatically change the album icon to that of the cd cover. Ideally it would be nice to set each of the artist folder icons to be a conglomerate of the contained cd covers.

Any suggestions?

Album art as folder icon

Reply #1 –
The freeware, no spyware, no adware icon maker Clic can do so. I've used it for years to make my own icons.

1. Open your .jpg, or any other image format you have (I suggest you have 24-bit colour for the best results) in any image viewer/editor, and copy it to the clipboard.
2. Open Clic.
3. In the Clic menu press Size, then select your icon size you have set to display on folders.
4. Press Edit, then select Paste to Fit.
5. Save your file, it will have an .ico extension, and be a valid icon file.

Read the help file, since you can do even more, such as removing for instance a yellow boarder around an image, etc., so that it doesn't necessarily have to be a generic looking square icon.

Album art as folder icon

Reply #2 –
Rename your cover art images to folder.jpg and explorer will display your folders as in the picture attached.

Album art as folder icon

Reply #3 –
Any tools to automate the process. I have alot of folders and would really like to just point to the root directory, say find jpg ->convert to icon-> auto change folder icon to album cover icon

Album art as folder icon

Reply #5 –
Two questions about the "folder.jpg" trick:
1. Seems that it does not work in Windows 2000; please confirm it's XP only
2. When it does work, is it only when using a "large icons" view, or all views?

Thanks

Album art as folder icon

Reply #6 –
You can see the images only when you have thumbnails mode activated.

Album art as folder icon

Reply #7 –
Quote
You can use any bulk rename utility.

Try:

Flexible Renamer
[a href="index.php?act=findpost&pid=281766"][{POST_SNAPBACK}][/a]


That will work for the folder.jpg, but I would prefer a way to change the actual icons for a cleaner look without the folder boarders.

Album art as folder icon

Reply #8 –
Here's a secret: you can convert any 24-bit bitmap into an icon by renaming the extension from .bmp to .ico

What you loose out on is multi-resolution icons and any type of transparency. But it is easy to make into a batch process. Photoshop or Paint Shop Pro have options for doing batch resize. To you could load up your album art, shrink it all to 32x32 or 48x48 and save to bmp, and then to a mass rename.

If you want something fancier, like icons that have both 32x32 and 48x48 sizes, you'll have to pay for something. There are shareware programs that might be good enough without paying: this one will do 5 icons in a batch without paying.
 

Album art as folder icon

Reply #9 –
Quote
If you want something fancier, like icons that have both 32x32 and 48x48 sizes, you'll have to pay for something.
[a href="index.php?act=findpost&pid=281836"][{POST_SNAPBACK}][/a]

Not really. The program I mentioned in my post is completely freeware, and will do sizes: 16x16, 24x24, 32x32, 48x48, 64x64, 72x72, 96x96 with or without transparency, however it doesn't have a batch function.

IrfanView could quickly batch convert the files to .ico as well, automatically size them, etc., via 'File->Batch Conversion/Rename', unfortunately it won't do the transparency thing -- like how icons are displayed on the desktop.