Wait… fav-what?

A favicon is simply the small icon attached to most websites that shows up in your browser’s navigation bar or bookmarks list. They can really help to back up the branding of a website.

Considering favicons are so widely used it is quite surprising that top of the line graphics packages such as Photoshop do no support this format. There are patches available, but there is also a fast and free alternative to creating favicons on the web.

The “Favicon from Pics” software at HTML Kits website lets you upload any picture in a common image format such as GIF or JPG, and it will create a favicon for you based upon that image. Download the icon package from the HTML Kits website and you are ready to install the favicon on your site.

Adding the icon to a webpage is an incredibly easy task. Firstly, upload the .ico file to the root of your website and then add the following code into the HEAD section of the page you want to add the icon to:

<link rel=”shortcut icon” href=”favicon.ico”>

Et voila, your favicon will be visible to the world!

Whether it’s resizing the product thumbnails for an e-commerce project or simply changing the filenames of the photos from our digital cameras, many of us have faced the daunting task of resizing, renaming or reformatting tens, if not hundreds, if not thousands of images before.

Batch image processing software can help with this rather dull task, reducing potentially hours of work down to a few clicks of a mouse.

There are a number of programs out there that offer a variety of batch processing techniques for images, including the standard resizing, renaming and reformatting functions. One of the best pieces of software I have come across is called BIMP Lite.

BIMP Lite is a small and simple batch processor for image files, that allows you to perform various functions on multiple images. It can be used to create thumbnail images from your pictures, add a prefix/postfix (with meta variables), rename using a sequential number, change the case of filenames, replace/remove spaces & underscores, flip or rotate images and also apply anti-aliasing, inverse, greyscale and bevel effects.

The thumbnail resizing allows you to force a specified width or height and keep theproportions, or define fixed image dimensions. Images can have text overlayed on them at anycorner or side, as well as the center of the image. This text can include meta variables such as image height, width, number of colours etc. In addition, the program can also convert the file format to GIF, JPG, PNG, BMP, MIFF, TIFF, PCX or TGA. All of the actions can be performed individually, or combined. BIMP now also includes an FTP client, so you can automatically output images to a remote server via the File Transfer Protocol.

The BIMP stands for “Batch Image Processor”, and it is a piece of freeware that does exactly what it says on the tin. Not only is this free software, but it is also very light to run, and incredibly simple to use. You can find out more about BIMP, and download it from here.

I have found this piece of software to be invaluable whilst developing e-commerce shops with large volumes of product photography. It is also incredibly helpful when generating thumbnail images for photo galleries and the renaming capabilities open it up for an even wider range of uses.

I found out about BIMP Lite in a very insightful article here, from Smashing Magazine. They list 15 handy batch image processors for both Windows and Mac systems. I would definitely recommend taking a look.