Comment 9 for bug 460941

Sebastien, your motivations for having this sent upstream intrigue me and I wish to subscribe to your newsletter. ;-)

I'd like to point out that it is possible to figure out the filename using the icon name (see below for some Python code), so it would be possible to have the file chooser start with this file selected. However, ideally this isn't the route we want to take. Instead the file chooser in this instance should be replaced by a dialog tailored towards the job at hand, findings icons.

That's going to require a bit of effort though and the Nautilus team can use any help they can get, so if you're interested in working on this, you'll want to start with writing a specification (rationale, use cases, user interface mockups). Some examples of specifications can be found at https://wiki.ubuntu.com/CategorySpec (template: https://wiki.ubuntu.com/SpecSpec) and https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Features (for example: https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Features/UserAccountDialog).

An elaborate example of a specification can be found at https://wiki.ubuntu.com/NotifyOSD

I'll keep an eye on this report.

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Here's some Python code which would allow you to lookup the filename for an icon name:

import gtk
icontheme = gtk.icon_theme_get_default()
iconinfo = icontheme.lookup_icon('totem', size=256, flags=gtk.ICON_LOOKUP_USE_BUILTIN)
print iconinfo.get_filename()
... /usr/share/icons/hicolor/scalable/apps/totem.svg

Had you gone with size=24 then it would have selected the PNG instead.