Is there a Python library for generating .ico files?

Question

I'm looking to create favicon.ico files programatically from Python, but PIL only has support for reading ico files.

Answer 1

According to Wikipedia modern browsers can handle favicons in PNG format, so maybe you could just generate that?

Alternatively the ICO article describes the format...

Answer 2

You can use Pillow:

from PIL import Image
filename = r'logo.png'
img = Image.open(filename)
img.save('logo.ico')

Optionally, you may specify the icon sizes you want:

icon_sizes = [(16,16), (32, 32), (48, 48), (64,64)]
img.save('logo.ico', sizes=icon_sizes)

The Pillow docs say that by default it will generate sizes [(16, 16), (24, 24), (32, 32), (48, 48), (64, 64), (128, 128), (255, 255)] and any size bigger than the original size or 255 will be ignored.

Yes, it is in the Read-only section of the docs, but it works to some extent.

Answer 3

Perhaps the following would work:

• Generate your icon image using PIL
• Convert the image to .ico format using the python interface to ImageMagick, PythonMagick

I have not tried this approach. The ImageMagick convert command line program was able to convert a .png file to .ico format, so at least ImageMagick supports the .ico format.

Answer 4

I don't know if this applies for all cases, but on WinXP an .ico can be a bmp of size 16x16, 32x32 or 64x64. Just change the extension to ico from bmp and you're ready to go.

Answer 5

If you have imageio, (probably the best library for reading/writing images in Python), you can use it:

import imageio

img = imageio.imread('logo.png')
imageio.imwrite('logo.ico', img)

Install is as easy as

pip install imageio