redesigned

Gimp is one of the few software that can store multiple icons sizes as a set properly in one ico allowing you to specify different color and compression standards and masking and compatibility levels.  It gets the right binary order for compatibility fallback.  There is no other software that I'm aware of with this level of control and support, and it makes rolling multi-size ico much smaller and more backwards compatible.  whomever implemented that part of their software really knew what they were doing.

Affinity doesn't have to get that technical or fancy, even basic ico support would be greatly appreciated.  same with avif and heic and webp.  it would greatly improve workflow to not be forced to reach to other software for conversions in and out.  I want Affinity to LEAD the modern workflow pack like it did when it was released. ❤️ because they are my favorite tools.

+1
wow, this thread is almost 7 years old

Maybe I was too blind another time. Nezumi, Stacy and Kuttyjoe are right. 
I should have said that it is a crucial feature. In my circle of acquaintances are some people that use Adobe Illustrator only because it's tracing capabilities. Two or three use Corel Draw (719 Euro, about US$ 865). And of cause Serif can't work on several feature projekts at the same time. I know that the wishlist is long. But for basic support should be an option. Basics like convert selection into shape. For example you can in Affinity Photo add borders to images with knocked out backgrounds. This should be possible as vector shape. I don't speak of photos that are realistically vector traced, which would be nice but at least Illustrator CS6 couldn't do without any problems. My claim is support in favor like the range of good old CS2 to CS6 - innovation of 2005, 16 years ago. I don't know how hard it is to implement. But I believe that if Serif would use Potrace which Inkscape additions there would be not so much work for Serifs tweaks. Like I said simple stuff, not fancy tracing features. Serif can build up a much better solution but that would be take some time. I really hate the fact that Serif doesn't publishes its Roadmap. If user would know what's going on there would be much more consent about implementation strategies. But users hear about it only in beta tests. 

This is my main reason for using Adobe Illustrator. I will have to remain a slave to Adobe for as long as this is not an option with Affinity. I hope it does get added. I think it was a big oversight not to include it in the first place.

Image Trace feature - PLEASE
We produce a lot of large wallhanging banners - mostly all drawn up in Illustrator.
Since Adobe have gone to a subscription we have tried to move away from their apps. Although we use Affinity Designer, we use the Image Trace feature in Illustrator every day. It's one of the features that has proved invaluable in saving us time in having to manually redraw bitmap graphics.
Hope you can add this feature soon.

Yes, vector magic is not only more expensive, but it does nothing else. Only vector conversions.
With Adobe Illustrator you can create vectors and also do conversions.
 
AD really needs this feature to compete with Adobe.
 
 

Just bought Designer with the hopes of phasing out of Illustrator. Love what I'm seeing so far, and wanted to add my 2 cents that a Live Trace option looks to be the only thing I've noticed so far that's keeping me from being able to use Designer exclusively.
 
Nothing fancy... I do a lot of black and white cartoon work that gets vector traced in order to bring into file prep for merchandise. I need a tight fidelity so that the hand-drawn roughness of the line quality is preserved. Black and white is necessary, though color options would be great to see.
 
 
Thanks so much for the program, and I look forward to seeing future updates!

+1 for trace

trace functionality its a must. I vote on it.

Tracing will come in the future - but it will be a new 'Persona' (one of the main buttons along the top left of the window) so that it can have its own UI and tools. We have a fair few ideas for this - not just the obvious... :)  It's not coming any time soon though, I'm afraid to say...

maybe I'm missing it, but is there an option to open a JPEG, or bitmap image
and trace,or convert it to a vector file for further editing? If not there should be one, it would be a great option. even if it had only a few modes like black and white, and 5 color
it would make me convince me to convert from adobe illustrator

A true ICO file is usually a collection of versions of an icon at different sizes but some software that ‘requires’ *.ico files will happily accept renamed PNG files.

I just discovered a whole bunch of 404s in our logs for favicon.ico. Our site carries a lot of PDFs. From what I can tell, when a user clicks a link to open a PDF the browser forgets the favicon for the page it's on and goes to look for a new one. Obviously, PDFs don't have a link element, so the browser is just looking for favicon.ico in the web root.
So there's a reason for still needing them, and +1 to this old thread.

Is very impressive that there are designers that do not understand that tools for designers need to cover all designers, not only web developers or newbies that know about icons through a favicon web search. Icons are still widely used in many instances and is a profitable business. I find hilarious when people says the new way is better because is new, but the new way is more tedious than the old *.ico file... one file carries all the sizes you added to it, with inherit adaptability to size request.
Every time you submit a power web app, you have to upload dozens of images to do what a single upload would accomplish on an *.ico file. Same on the Apple Store or Google Android Apps, which is ridiculous. That process would be simpler and lighter with probably a new WebM icon file. But since does not exists, haven't done due research to be absolutely sure, you have to upload either one by one or on a compress file. And if you make a change then you have to do the whole process to produce the same list back again. Very ridiculous again in my opinion. Is that the new way you referring to? I'm not sold.
Anyway... Other Possible Solutions
You can use Gimp2 to create icons too. Open source and downloadable tool with pretty other nice tools that you won't find either in Affinity Photo or Photoshop without plugins... for example, exporting *.ico files and creating Normal Maps... among others.
The way Gimp handle it, you start by creating your 256px (like in old days) or larger icon size 512px, and scale that down per layer, and if a layer start looking blurry then you can import your small version or even create them in the same file. Once you have all the sizes you want to cover, Export your layered Gimp file as an *.ico file. Is that easy. Gimp even has an icon previewer if I'm not mistaken, don't quote me on this.
Also, Inkscape has an icon generator integrated. Another open source vector base application, with an icon previewer as well.

Gimp is one of the few software that can store multiple icons sizes as a set properly in one ico allowing you to specify different color and compression standards and masking and compatibility levels.  It gets the right binary order for compatibility fallback.  There is no other software that I'm aware of with this level of control and support, and it makes rolling multi-size ico much smaller and more backwards compatible.  whomever implemented that part of their software really knew what they were doing.

Affinity doesn't have to get that technical or fancy, even basic ico support would be greatly appreciated.  same with avif and heic and webp.  it would greatly improve workflow to not be forced to reach to other software for conversions in and out.  I want Affinity to LEAD the modern workflow pack like it did when it was released. ❤️ because they are my favorite tools.

Morning, 
We have decided to implement WebP export for (hopefully) 1.9.
The decision is not solely because it is now supported in Safari - although that doesn't hurt.
In the time I have been working here at Serif (15+ years), there have been hundreds of "JPEG / PNG killer" file formats announced - not a single one has succeeded. If we had supported each one, we would now have a massive amount of export code to maintain which was used by either 1 or 2 people, or more likely nobody. We don't like to remove features which we have added - so we would be stuck with the problem forever.
We generally don't implement new export formats unless a.) They are old but have some unique technical feature which is genuinely useful or b.) They are new and have either a good chance of achieving widespread adoption or have some unique technical feature which we think has merit.
WebP is being implemented because we think it has a high chance of widespread adoption.
Hope this helps,
Andy.

+1
The comparisons here are impressive:
https://jakearchibald.com/2020/avif-has-landed/
 

I confirm ! Same for WebP... Any news about that ?

PLUS ONE for this, web browsers will support this from September and I would love to convert all online images to this as it stands an AVIF image of the same quality is 10 times smaller than a  jpg and that would super speed up any webpages which  will effect google seo rankings.

Hello,
Support for the AVIF file format would be nice to see as web browsers will start supporting it. It would be nice to read and write images in that format.
Best regards!

..."always" ? – I am not really experienced with .svg but I would expect not to cause rasterisation at least for certain effects, e.g. blur.
This w3schools page lists some code-only filters / effects, click the "Next" button to experience the blur in svg without rasterisation / bitmap.
If I drag the attached .svg file onto a browser window it shows a blurred rectangle, though the file doesn't contain bitmap but text only. 
What is my misunderstanding?
blur.svg

I was able to get them to launch again by deleting all windows color calibration profiles and setting all three displays to sRGB IEC1966-2.1 (default), as well as the system default profile to sRGB IEC1966-2.1 and restarting.

The surface screen was previously set to the default surface Enhanced profile.

It would appear this bug is in working with windows color profiles.
Having them all just stop working was quite the scare, hopefully this bug gets fixed soon, I was fortunate enough to stumble on the solution myself by trying everything I could find in any of the forums.
Hopefully this information helps the dev team find and fix the bug and anyone else experiencing this issue get going again.

Thanks! ❤️ 

ico is a crucial format to support for proper iconing of web apps that require multiple icon sizes and still considered best practice.

ico can hold multiple resolutions, and almost all devices and apps are smart enough to pull the resolution they need automatically from the single ico asset and ico are supported on all major os.

being able to generate these from an svg like gimp can would be fantastic.