What do you use to create a favicon? Photoshop? Illustrator? How do you guys make those cool little icons?
It doesn't have to be named favicon.ico but that's sort of a standard. Once you've created it and uploaded it to the root directory of your site, add this to your pages: <head> <link REL="SHORTCUT ICON" HREF="favicon.ico"> ... </head> Code (markup):
What Crazy_Rob has said will work just fine in the vast majority of cases. For a little more info, an ico file isn't just a little GIF file that is renamed with a .ico extension. The ICO file (icon image file format) can be a bundle of images at different resolutions depending on use such as 16×16, 32×32, 64×64 and 128×128. (The latter two are more rare.) This way depending on where the icon will be displayed an appropriate sized icon can be used. Some older browers (I'm not sure about any current ones) cannot read favicons that are created in other formats (like GIF) that are simply renamed to favicon.ico. I'm really just being anal as most browsers will support what Crazy_Rob has described with most image formats.
Yep, I was about to reiterate exactly what tFlight was saying. But in regards to the topic of this thread, I use a combination of two programs. 1. I creat the image that I want for my favicon in photoshop. 2. Then I use Axialis Icon Workshop to convert to an actual .ico format. What works out really great is that Axialis Icon Workshop actually has a plugin for photoshop that will automatically convert any PS image into a .ico. This is especially important, since simply renaming it .ico instead of .gif will typically not work, at least that's my understanding.
GIF and JPG are compressed file formats. But you can use Paint to create it as a bitmap (BMP) file and then rename it. That's how I did mine (I think - it was a few years ago).
If you want to be able to do everything from within photoshop (no website tool) check out this guide. All you need to do is add the .ico plugin to the PS plugins folder and you can save your 16x16 image directly to .ico format. http://photoshopsupport.com/tutorials/jennifer/favicon.html
I use irfanview. It is free image viewer/converter. It is ugly and i dont like it, but he can do the job. Also, can be used as a Total Commander image viewer. Since Photoshop is industrial standard software for image manipulation, i presume that you using it too. My version does not have ico support. And I think that noone version have it. So here is how i create fav: create bmp image. Save it as 256 color bmp. Then open it in irfanview and save it as .ico. This is way to create real .ico files. No other format with just renamed extension and luck that original format can be read by browsers. (all this info: use it if you dont like public services, on net)
It might not support it out of the box, but Photoshop DOES support the .ico plugin. After putting it in the plugin folder, you can save any image to .ico here is the actual direct link to the plugin http://www.telegraphics.com.au/sw/
As far as I know, Internet Explorer checks by default for favicon.ico and some older versions of Netscape Navigator needed that meta information in the header in order to show an icon. The graphics is a 16x16 icon but browsers will usually recognize the image even if it's gif, bmp or gif (however this doesn't mean you should just ignore the file formats and do what you please, future browsers may be more sensitive about this) PS. Irfanview is enough for this, it even has transparency support for icons.
Just make a small gif image (16x16px). then upload it to : http://www.html-kit.com/favicon/ it will create the ico file you'll put on your site.