I'm a UNIX-jocky

It's true, I, Jon Carr, am a UNIX-jocky. Well... sort of. I've finally found a use for Mac OS X's UNIX underpinnings, and it's called SIPS.

SIPS (Scriptable Image Processing System) is, as far as I know, a little-known image processor built into Darwin which amongst other things can convert an ICNS file into a more useful image file of your choosing.

In several of my last posts I have used icons from a number of apps, and I got a hold of these using SIPS to convert the ICNS files from the apps' resources into PNG. It gives you lossless quality complete with transparency. Yay! So much better than screenshooting the icon in the Applications folder.

I believe there are GUI apps about to do this, but they cost money!

Okay, so how do I sip?

• Open Terminal, which you shall find in Applications > Utilities, you UNIX-dummy.


• You then type
  
  sips -s format YOUR-CHOSEN-FORMAT PATH-TO-ICNS-FILE --out PATH-TO-NEW-IMAGE-FILE
  
  replacing the stuff in capitals with the relevant variables. For example:
  
  sips -s format png "/Users/Jon/Documents/icon.icns" --out "/Users/Jon/Desktop/icon.png"


• In a split-second a shinny image will be sipped from the ICNS, ready to be dropped into Photoshop (or whatever).


• You can convert to png, tiff, psd, jpeg, gif, jp2, pict, bmp, qtif, sgi, and tga - what other format could you possibly want?

A big thumbs-up to macosxhints.com for making this known to me.