custom icons for zarr files

[sofroniewn]

When making a zarr file is there a way to have a custom icon (say a heavily down sampled version of an image) appear instead of the folder icon? Or anyway to embed metadata such that things like the "preview mode" in a mac can show some image of what's inside?

I can precompute this icon and even convert it to some png like byte string or svg format if needed, I just need to know how to put it on the folder - which maybe isn't so much of a zarr question, but other people using zarr may have done this or may want to do this.

[sofroniewn]

To follow up here, I'm not making much progress on this issue. It seems like on windows / linux there are .ico files and on mac .icns files that can be used for this stuff, but I can't even figure out how to use python to programmatically set a .icns file to be the icon of a folder on a mac (though I can do it manually).

It seems like there is no existing python package to allow for setting of custom icons in a cross platform way. Such a package would clearly be independent from zarr, but if such a high-quality package existed (and it didn't come with very complex dependencies) then it could be a nice thing for zarr to leverage for microscopy datasets.

[sofroniewn]

In case anyone else is following this thread I've made good progress on getting this working on a mac (see napari/napari#490 (comment) and napari/napari#511 (comment) if you are curious). I'm still not sure what cross-platform support looks like, but we'll probably be looking into that on those issues / PRs too.