Wandering electrons... but not too far

This tips and tricks is for 9.2x versions and earlier.

What we're going to do hear is create favicons for those sites that don't have one, and tell Opera to use it for bookmarks and by extension the personal bar.

What you will need

• A basic photo editing program (I'll be using photoshop, but that's arguably overkill for what we're doing here) that has...

• ...the ability to create an ".ico" file
  

• A little imagination

That's all!

An example

First of all take a look at your address bar. See that red O there that's casting a shadow? That's the Opera website's favicon. It's a small image file that measures only 16X16 pixels. The opera web-page HTML markup has a command that makes your browser go get this image and use it as it's "symbol" if you will. If you have Opera web-pages bookmarked, this same image will display in your bookmark list, unless you've instructed your browser not to do so.

Let's find a website that doesn't have a favicon...let's see... ah! Here's one: "The all one search page" (A search motor that doesn't have a favicon, what's the world coming to?)

Go ahead and click the link, and you'll see that the website does not have it's own favicon. Since there isn't one, Opera just puts in a generic icon somewhere between the new tab icon and the bookmark icon.

When you bookmark the site, Opera will use its generic bookmark icon. Go ahead and bookmark it just to see; you can always delete it later

The Problem

In the bookmarks, the lack of a favicon is not really a problem because you have the name of the website written next to it. But what happens if you put this on the personal bar? Well if you have your personal bar set up to show images and text, or text only, again there is no problem because the written name will appear. But if you use the personal bar with images only, there will be nothing that identifies the favicon-less website. Let's go ahead and put our example on the personal bar to see what this looks like: Click right on the bookmark, and check "Show on personal bar".

One is no big deal, but when there are 3 or 4 of these cases it starts getting problematic.

The Fix

Now, I'm in no way proposing that you do this for all the favicon-less bookmarks that you have. No, let's just do the following for those bookmarks that you put on your personal bar.

Step 1: Find what could be used as a favicon.

Let's look at our all one search web-page again and try to find something that would be a good symbol for it.

Hmmm.

I don't know about you, but I think that blue swirly thingamajig will be just perfect. Why? Two reasons: in your mind it will be very quickly associated to the website; and it is roughly square... well it's more so rectangular but it'll work anyway.

Step 2: Harvest the image and edit it in your photo editing program.

I've gotten in the habit of just hitting "Print Screen" then opening my photo editor then Ctrl+N (new document), then Ctrl+V (paste in the screen shot).

Now crop down to just the blue swirly, cutting as close as you can:


OK, now we need to resize this down to 16 pixels wide by 16 pixels high. This is going to deform the current shape slightly because we're going to force a rectangular image to become square. But for our needs that isn't important. Generally however you do want to try to find something that is more or less square to begin with.

Anyhoo, in Photoshop, click Image>Image size... Uncheck "Constrain proportions", then under "pixel dimensions" type 16 in both the width and height boxes, keeping "pixels" in the neighboring drop-down menu. Hit "OK". Your image should now be square, measuring 16X16 pixels:


Step 3: Save the image in the right format and in the right folder

Now we need to save this image as a Windows icon; this is a special type of file who's extension is ".ico". Go to File>Save as. In the "Format" drop-down menu, choose "ICO (Windows Icon)". (There is a chance that this format will not be present in the format drop-down menu. If this is your case, search on the web for a plug-in for your photo editing program; you can almost always find one for free somewhere.)

Still in the "Save as..." dialog, name the favicon with the name of the website. In our example this would be "www.allonesearch.com.ico".

Now you need to save it in the "Images" folder of Opera. It's location may vary according to your setup:
C>Program files>Opera>Profile>Images
Or
C>Documents and Settings>(user account)>Application Data>Opera>profile>images

Step 4: Make sure you don't accidentally lose it.

Got it saved in the right place and in the right format? OK. Now using your Windows Explorer (or equivalent) navigate again to the Images folder, where you saved the new favicon and find it. Click right on it, choose "Properties" and check the "Read only" box, then click "OK". This will prevent the favicon from being erased when you delete your private data. The last thing you want to do is to accidentally erase this file, because it won't be regenerated when you re-visit the website; this favicon is unique to your computer.

While you're here, go ahead and copy the name of the file onto your clipboard: right-click>Properties>"General" tab--highlight the file name and hit "Ctrl+C". Then click on "Cancel" in the dialog box.

Step 5: associate the favicon with your bookmarked website.

IMPORTANT: CLOSE OPERA BEFORE DOING THE FOLLOWING.
(I know, I know, "I can't read these instructions if I close Opera!?" That's what's called a "paradoxical situation". But I'm sure you'll figure out a way.)

Navigate to your Opera "profile" folder (see above) and open the file "opera6.adr" in your notepad application. This is the file that keeps track of your bookmarks. As you can see, each bookmark has a unique ID and then a list of information: Name, URL, CREATED, VISITED, etc. Using the Find feature (Ctrl+F), find the website for which you made the favicon. In our example you would search for "http://www.allonesearch.com/", or a fragment thereof. It is possible that a single website exists more than once in your bookmarks. You want to find the bookmark that contains the information: "ON PERSONALBAR=YES".

Did you find it? good. You will see a line "ICONFILE=Bookmark Visited" (or possibly "ICONFILE=Bookmark Unvisited"). Replace the "bookmark (Un)Visited" part by the file name of your newly created favicon. In our example this will be "www.allonesearch.com.ico" (no quotation marks). (If you copied the name of the file to the clipboard in the previous step, you can just highlight the "bookmark (Un)Visited" part and hit Ctrl+V). The line should now look like this:

ICONFILE=www.allonesearch.com.ico

Save the change and close notepad.

Step 6: Enjoy!

Reopen Opera:


Repeat these steps for each personal bar item that doesn't have its own favicon. The first time you do this, it seems long, but once you get in the habit, making a personal favicon only takes 3 or 4 minutes, so it's well worth the effort!

One last tip: When you remove a bookmark from your personal bar, be sure to right click it, select "Properties" and uncheck the "Show on personal bar" box. As you know, you can also remove it by simply clicking right and choosing directly "Remove from toolbar". Indeed that's less clicks, but this deletes as well the favicon association that you so carefully created in step 5 above. I have no idea why. In any case, passing by the "Properties" dialog avoids this problem.

Ciao!