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
 * 2) *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.
 * 3) *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.
 * 4) In Preview choose the largest/best image and choose File→Save As…
 * 5) Save the file as PNG with alpha.
 * 6) 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!