How to copy Mac application icons

Have you ever needed to copy a Mac application icon? You may wish to include the application icon in a blog post, printed document, presentation slide or elsewhere. If so, stop rooting around in application folders using the ‘Show Package Contents’ method. Here is a much easier way.

Copy Mac application icons to Preview

Let’s assume that we wish to copy the application icon from Exposé. Open the Finder and Right Click or Control+Click the Exposé application but don’t select Show Package Contents from the contextual menu – choose Copy Exposé instead.

Next, open the Preview application and either go to File → New From Clipboard or simply press Command+N. You should now see the application icon in five different sizes.

Mac application icon sizes

Make sure you have the Preview sidebar open, so you can see the whole group of application icons. Naturally, if you’ve changed the Preview preferences to other than Open groups of images in the same window, you may see a different view.

• 512 x 512 pixels
• 256 x 256 pixels
• 128 x 128 pixels
• 32 x 32 pixels
• 16 x 16 pixels

Save Mac application icons in other formats

The document type for application icons is Apple icon image (*.icns) but Mac OS X Leopard allows you to easily save the icons in other formats.

Select the Action button at the bottom of the Preview sidebar (looks like a little gear) to see menu choices for Sort By, Mail Image, Send Image to iPhoto, Send Image to Aperture or Save Selected.

If you choose Save Selected, you may save any of the application icons to your hard drive in GIF, JPEG, JPEG-2000, Microsoft BMP, OpenEXR, PDF, Photoshop, PICT, PNG, SGI, TGA or TIFF.