PNG to ICO converter

Turn a PNG into a real multi-size .ico file: a favicon.ico for your website or an icon for a Windows app, shortcut or folder. Transparency is kept. Free, and your images never leave your browser.

Images (you can pick several; each one becomes its own .ico)

No images yet. You can also drop files on this box.

Settings

Sizes
Fit
Background
Encoding

Favicon: 16, 32 and 48 px. Windows: 16, 24, 32, 48, 64, 128 and 256 px, the set Windows uses for app and folder icons. All sizes: the same without 24.

Preview

Add an image to see every size here.

Why an ICO file and not just a PNG?

An ICO file holds several sizes of the same icon in one file, and the program picks the one that fits: 16 px in a browser tab, 32 px in the taskbar, 48 px and up in Explorer. Windows needs .ico for app, shortcut and folder icons, and browsers and Google still request /favicon.ico from the site root even when you also link PNG icons. Renaming a .png to .ico is not a real ICO and some tools reject it.

How to use the .ico file

As a favicon: name it favicon.ico, put it in your site's root folder (so it loads at https://yoursite.com/favicon.ico) and add <link rel="icon" href="/favicon.ico" sizes="48x48"> to your <head>. Google Search wants a square favicon that is a multiple of 48 px, which the Favicon set includes. Need the PNG icons and webmanifest too? Use the favicon generator, then check the result with the favicon checker.

On Windows: right-click a shortcut → Properties → Change Icon → Browse and pick the .ico. For a folder: Properties → Customize → Change Icon. Developers can set it as the app icon in Visual Studio, Electron (icon in the build config) or PyInstaller (--icon app.ico). Choose the Windows set so the icon stays sharp at every zoom level.

How it works

Your browser decodes each image and draws it on a canvas at every size you picked (SVGs are rendered from the vector at each size). The sizes are then packed into one ICO file on this page, so nothing is uploaded. "PNG" stores every size as PNG, which is smaller and read by Windows Vista and later and by every browser. "Classic BMP" stores the small sizes as classic 32-bit bitmaps with an alpha channel, like the icons Windows ships, for old tools and resource compilers that don't read PNG entries.

Other ICO conversions: JPG to ICO, SVG to ICO. Going the other way? Use ICO to PNG to pull the image back out of an .ico file.

Need icons or screenshots of live websites?

The Shotmint API renders any URL or HTML in Chromium and returns a PNG, JPG, WebP or PDF, for example site thumbnails for a link directory:

curl "https://shotmint.creasework.com/v1/screenshot?url=https://example.com&width=1280&height=800&format=png" -H "X-API-Key: YOUR_KEY" -o site.png

Each screenshot is 1 credit. €5 buys 2,000 with no subscription, and credits never expire.

Get 25 free renders a month Website thumbnail generator

FAQ

Are my images uploaded? No. Everything runs in JavaScript on this page.

What size should the source image be? At least 256×256 px for a sharp 256 px icon. Smaller sources are scaled up and look soft. An SVG works at any size.

My image isn't square. "Pad to square" keeps the whole image and fills the sides with the background (transparent by default), "Crop center" cuts the middle square, and "Stretch" squeezes it.

Can I just rename a PNG to .ico? Browsers often show it anyway, but it holds one size only, and Windows and many tools reject it as an icon. This tool writes a real ICO with its size directory.