Picture Batch JPG to ICO
JPG to ICO
A JPEG is often the only version of a picture you have — a photo, a scanned badge, a logo someone emailed. Windows shortcuts, folder icons and the favicon a site serves at its root all want an .ico instead. This page builds one from your JPEG locally, with every size scaled from the full-resolution original, and checks the icon opens before offering it.
Drop JPEG images here
JPEG files — or any of PNG, WebP, AVIF, BMP, ICO, TIFF, GIF or camera raw (CR2, CR3, NEF, ARW, DNG, RAF, ORF, RW2). Everything runs on this device.
Or paste an image from the clipboard.
Your images never leave this device. They are decoded and re-encoded by your own browser, and the security policy on every page blocks this site from sending them anywhere.
A Windows icon container holding several sizes of the same image in one file.
ICO is lossless — it stores every pixel exactly, so there is nothing to trade away.
Images keep their original dimensions.
Images are turned upright from their own orientation data, and left that way.
Kept. ICO stores a full alpha channel, so cut-outs and soft edges come through exactly.
ICO output carries no metadata block, so camera, date and location tags are dropped whichever option you pick.
Sizes larger than the source image are left out rather than upscaled. Sizes up to 64 pixels are stored as bitmaps so older Windows versions can read them; larger ones as PNG.
ICO has nowhere to store Exif metadata, so it is dropped whatever you choose here.
What happens to your image
The icon holds several sizes at once, so it is larger than any one of them but still small — usually well under 100 kB.
| Property | Outcome |
|---|---|
| Transparency | Preserved: JPEG images have no transparency to lose. |
| Image quality | Preserved: Nothing further is lost. ICO is lossless, so it stores exactly what the JPEG decoded to — including the compression artefacts the JPEG already had. |
| Colour | Partly preserved: Output uses eight-bit colour and is treated as sRGB. Colour management depends on the decoder; source profiles are not copied, and wide-gamut colours may change. |
| Exif metadata | Not preserved: ICO output from this tool carries no metadata block, so camera and location tags are dropped. |
| Orientation | Preserved: Applied to the pixels, and the tag is reset to upright afterwards so nothing rotates the image a second time. |
One file, several sizes inside it
An .ico is a small container holding the same picture at several sizes, so Windows and browsers can pick the one that fits instead of scaling a single image badly. By default this writes 16, 24, 32, 48, 64, 128 and 256 pixel entries, and the icon sizes control lets you choose which.
Sizes larger than the shorter side of your JPEG are left out rather than enlarged. A 200-pixel photo produces an icon that tops out at 128 pixels, because a blurred upscaled entry looks worse than letting the system scale the nearest real one.
A JPEG has no transparency, so the icon has a background
JPEG cannot store transparent pixels, so whatever background the photo has comes into the icon as a solid square. On a light taskbar or browser tab a white background disappears; on a dark one it shows as a white tile.
If you want the shape alone, with nothing around it, remove the background in an image editor and save a PNG first, then use the PNG to ICO page. A converter cannot tell which pixels you meant to be background.
Rectangular photos are padded, not stretched
Icons are square and most photos are not. Each entry fits the whole picture inside the square and fills the remainder with transparency, so nothing is squashed. Cropping the photo to a square yourself before converting gives a larger subject in every size.
Detail disappears at the smallest sizes
A photograph reduced to 16 pixels is a handful of coloured dots. Faces, fine text and busy backgrounds become unrecognisable, and no resampling method recovers them. Close-cropped, high-contrast subjects survive best; for a favicon, a simple mark almost always works better than a photo.
Metadata is not carried into the icon, because the format has nowhere to keep it. The camera, date and any location recorded in the JPEG are dropped.
If something goes wrong
The icon has a white or coloured square behind the subject.
That is the JPEG's own background. JPEG has no transparency, so there is nothing to tell the converter which pixels to leave out.
What to do: Cut the subject out in an image editor, save it as PNG with a transparent background, and convert that instead.
The largest size I expected is missing.
Sizes bigger than the shorter side of the source image are left out rather than enlarged.
What to do: Start from a larger JPEG — at least 256 pixels on its shorter side for a full set of sizes.
The new icon does not show up on the desktop or in the browser tab.
Windows and browsers both cache icons heavily, separately from the files themselves.
What to do: Hard-refresh the page, or for a Windows shortcut change the icon and change it back. Loading the .ico on its own confirms the file is fine.
Questions
What size JPG makes a good icon?
Square, at least 256 by 256 pixels, with the subject filling most of the frame. Every entry is scaled down from that original, so a larger source gives cleaner small sizes.
Can I use the ICO as a website favicon?
Yes. Save it as favicon.ico at the root of your site, which is where browsers and a great deal of other software look by default.
Is my photo uploaded?
No. The icon is built by your browser on this device, and the page is not permitted to send your image anywhere.