Introduction
I’m customizing my Notion databases, and that means hunting down cute icons for my pages. I love icons from video games like the RPG Maker series, and there are some wonderful people that have turned those icons into bundles we call sprite sheets. But when they are all together in one graphic, you can’t upload them individually.
In this blog post, I’ll show you how to turn a sprite sheet into a collection of separate images, that you can use for Notion or whatever other purpose strikes your fancy.
Step 1: Acquire Sprite Sheet
My favourite place to get sprite sheets is The Spriter’s Resource. You can type in the name of a game you like, or type in the word ‘icon’ and scroll through the thousands of results.
For this tutorial, I will be using this sprite sheet from RPG Maker VX Ace, uploaded by TheMorningFlash15.
Step 2: Get Sprite Dimensions
Open up a copy of this file in Photoshop (you might be able to use alternatives like Photopea too).
(If your sprite sheet has extra space or other assets around it, crop those out before this step, as we need pixel precision to make sure every sprite comes out the same size).
Click Image in the top menu, then Image Size, and look at the dimensions in pixels.
The width is the useful number here, (in this case 384px), note it down.
Next, count the number of sprites across the first row. In this case, it’s 16.
Now divide the number of pixels by the number of sprites. 384/16 = 24. Each sprite is therefore 24x24px in size. (If the sprites were not square, you’d need to do the same caulation for the height axis).
Step 3: Scaling Up Sprites
For programs like Notion, the page icons get scaled up in an anti-aliased, blurry way. If we imported 24×24 icons into it, they would look blurred and unappealing.
We will need to scale up the icons. I find that 96px is a fair balance between file size and quality.
So, we will scale up our sprite sheet. Open the Image Size dialog again, and change the width dropdown to percent. Set the percent for both width and height to 400. This will multiply each side 4 times, to give sprites that are 96 x 96px. And set the resample dropdown to Nearest Neighbour, to keep the pixel art pixel-perfect, with no aliasing.
(You can choose a different percentage, but it must be a multiple of 200. So 200, 400, 600, etc, otherwise the pixels will become distorted)
Step 4: Set a Grid
Note: At this point, if your sprite sheed had a background, it would be a good time to erase it.
Now we are now going to make a grid that perfectly divides the sprites. We know the sprites will be 96 x 96px. So, open the Preferences dialog (on PC you can use the shortcut Ctrl K), and click on Grid, Guide & Slices.
In the Grid section, set the gridline to every 96px, subdivisions 1.
Click OK to close the dialog. Then, turn on the grid, shortcut for this is Ctrl ‘ (appostrope)
Each icon is now within a grid box.
Step 5: Turn Grid into Guides
Now we are going to turn the grid into guides, which is a necessary interim step before we can add slices.
First, let’s make sure we have our document set up to measure in pixels. Go to the Edit menu, go down to Preferences (or press Ctrl K). In the Units and Rulers section, set the rulers to pixels, and click OK.
Then, Zoom out your document so you can see the whole thing during this step.
In the View menu at the top of the screen, scroll down to Guides, and then click New Guide Layout.
In the subsequent dialog, type 0 in the Gutter for colums and rows.
Then, input the 96 pixel size into the width and height.
For the number of columns and downs, increase each until the perfectly match the grid you set up before. Rolling your mouse wheel to change the numbers makes it easy to see exactly when you reach the right number. In this case, it was 16 columns and 33 rows.
(You could potentially skip Step 4 and go straight to this step, if the grid is very well defined. But if there is a lot of empty space around the icons, the grid eliminates any errors in icon sizing.)
If your guides don’t match upon exiting this dialog, you can still fix it. Just open the dialog again, enter new settings, and ensure ‘clear existing guides’ is checked at the bottom.
Step 6: Convert Guides to Slices
Click the Slices tool in the left toolbar. Above the document, in the context menu, you’ll see a Slices From Guides button. Click that.
Every icon will now have a little blue label on it.
Step 7: Export Slices
We are now ready to save the icons as separate images.
In the File menu, click Export > Save for Web (Legacy). There will be a preview of the file. Currently, the slices are not selected. To select them, click and drag a box over the whole document.
Then, in the dropdowns on the right, choose the file type you want to export as. I picked PNG 24, with transparent background. It took a few seconds to process this selection, since we have so many slices in this document.
Click the Save… button, and choose where you want the file to go. Make sure in the Slices dropdown at the bottom, you have All Slices selected. And it doesn’t matter that the ‘filename’ there ends in .gif, your sices will still be PNGs (if that’s what you selected in the window above)
The files will export to an Images subdirectory.
Conclusion
Voila! Every icon is now a separate image, 96x96px, that you can use in whatever creative way you want (that respects the copyright of the creator, of course!)
If you have any questions or comments, please leave them below!
Peace, love & sunshine,
Jess
