How to get high resolution website logo (favicon) for a given URL - image

Question

I'm developing a web browser on Android and want to show the URL logo for the most visited sites like in Chrome (4 X 2). But the problem is that most favicons (eg: http://www.bbc.co.uk/favicon.ico) are of size either 16X16 or 32X32 and they don't look good when scaled up.
Is there a way I can download a high resolution icon/bitmap for an URL in a standard way? How about opening the home page and then extracting all the image links and then choose an image with the name logo in it? Would this method work for all the URLs? I want to know if there is a standard way to obtain a high resolution icon for a given URL or favicon is the only standard way to get the website logo?

Answer 1

You can code it yourself or use an existing solution.
Do-it-yourself algorithm
Look for Apple touch icon declarations in the code, such as <link rel="apple-touch-icon" href="/apple-touch-icon.png">. Theses pictures range from 57x57 to 152x152. See Apple specs for full reference.
Even if you find no Apple touch icon declaration, try to load them anyway, based on Apple naming convention. For example, you might find something at /apple-touch-icon.png. Again, see Apple specs for reference.
Look for high definition PNG favicon in the code, such as <link rel="icon" type="image/png" href="/favicon-196x196.png" sizes="196x196">. In this example, you have a 196x196 picture.
Look for Windows 8 / IE10 and Windows 8.1 / IE11 tile pictures, such as <meta name="msapplication-TileImage" content="/mstile-144x144.png">. These pictures range from 70x70 to 310x310, or even more. See these Windows 8 and Windows 8.1 references.
Look for /browserconfig.xml, dedicated to Windows 8.1 / IE11. This is the other place where you can find tile pictures. See Microsoft specs.
Look for the og:image declaration such as <meta property="og:image" content="http://somesite.com/somepic.png"/>. This is how a web site indicates to FB/Pinterest/whatever the preferred picture to represent it. See Open Graph Protocol for reference.
At this point, you found no suitable logo... damned! You can still load all pictures in the page and make a guess to pick the best one.
Note: Steps 1, 2 and 3 are basically what Chrome does to get suitable icons for bookmark and home screen links. Coast by Opera even use the MS tile pictures to get the job done. Read this list to figure out which browser uses which picture (full disclosure: I am the author of this page).
APIs and open source projects
RealFaviconGenerator: You can get any web site favicon or related icon (such as the Touch Icon) with this favicon retrieval API. Full disclosure: I'm the author of this service.
BestIcon: Although less comprehensive, Besticon offers a good alternative, especially if you want to host the code yourself. There is also a hosted version you can use right away.

Answer 2

The Go code at https://github.com/mat/besticon tries to solve this problem.
For example
$ besticon http://github.com
http://github.com: https://github.com/apple-touch-icon-144.png
There is also an accompanying hosted version of the code, see for example http://icons.better-idea.org/icons?url=github.com.
(Disclaimer: I wrote it because I needed to solve the same problem a while ago.)

Answer 3

another option is getting favicons from any domain using a hidden google API
the favicon link pattern will be
https://www.google.com/s2/favicons?domain={domain}&sz={size}
for example
https://www.google.com/s2/favicons?domain=stackoverflow.com&sz=64

Answer 4

Logos are not going to be consistently named and very difficult to identify consistently. Consider putting the favicon on a colour tile of suitable dimensions. People will quickly associate the colour with the website. You could either extract a dominant colour from the website or favicon using something like colorthief, or make each one unique using a golden angle formula to choose a hue.

Answer 5

Here is a new and genuine solution which will always give you the best results-
Webchromeclient gives a callback of onReceivedTouchIconUrl method for all the websites just hold the url from here.
Next step is to convert this url to bitmap which can be done like this-
try {
URL url = new URL(touchiconUrl);
HttpURLConnection connection =
(HttpURLConnection)url.openConnection();
connection.setDoInput(true);
connection.connect();
InputStream input = connection.getInputStream();
Bitmap myBitmap = BitmapFactory.decodeStream(input);
return myBitmap;
} catch (IOException e) {
e.printStackTrace();
return null;
}
Next step is to send this bitmap for the shortcut.
Note: Remember to create bitmap on background thread like asynctask.

Answer 6

This HTML document requires a base url and the HTML/"View Page Source" of the web page and should output the values.
<!doctype html>
<input type=text placeholder=URL><br>
Place "View Page Source" of HTML homepage<br>
<textarea id=HTML placeholder="HTML content of webpage">
</textarea><br>
<input type=Submit>
<script>
function url(u,n){
try{
u = u.getAttribute(n);
}
catch(e){
return 'null';
}
if(u.slice(0,2) == "//"){
u = "http:"+u;
}
else if(u.slice(0,1) == "/"){
u = u.slice(0,1);
}
return '<img src="'+u+'">';
}
document.querySelector('input[type=Submit]').onclick = function(){
var output = '';
var HTML = document.getElementById('HTML').value;
var doc = document.implementation.createHTMLDocument("New Document");
doc.documentElement.innerHTML = HTML;
output = output + "apple-touch-icon<br>"+url([].slice.apply(doc.querySelectorAll('link[rel="apple-touch-icon"]')).reverse()[0],'href')
// deprecated output = output + "apple-touch-icon-precomposed<br>"+url([].slice.apply(doc.querySelectorAll('link[rel="apple-touch-icon-precomposed"]')).reverse()[0],'href')
output = output + "<br>image/png<br>" + url(doc.querySelectorAll('link[rel="icon"][type="image/png"]')[0],'href');
// <meta name="msapplication-TileImage" content="/mstile-144x144.png">
// deprecated output = output + "<br>msapplication-Ti:<br>"+ url(doc.querySelectorAll('link[name="msapplication-TileImage"]')[0],'content');
// <meta name="msapplication-config" content="/browserconfig.xml/ ">
//output = output + "<br>msapplication-con: "+ url(doc.querySelectorAll('meta[name="msapplication-config"]')[0],'content');
// <meta property="og:image" content="http://somesite.com/somepic.png"/>
output = output + "<br>og:image<br>" + url(doc.querySelectorAll('meta[property="og:image"]')[0],'content');
// <link rel="image_src" href="https://cdn.sstatic.net/Sites/stackoverflow/Img/apple-touch-icon.png?v=c78bd457575a">
output = output + "<br>image_source<br>" + url(doc.querySelectorAll('link[rel="image_src"]')[0],'href');
var URL = window.location.hash;
document.getElementById('output').innerHTML = output;
};</script>
<div id=output></div>
If you would like to automate the retrieval of the HTML you could use something like the following for PHP.
<? echo file_get_contents($_GET["url"]);

Answer 7

Usually favicon is small (like 16x16 or 32x32). If you need bigger dimensions, extract not favicon, but logo from homepage/header.