Picture Batch PNG to ICO
PNG to ICO
A favicon that is a single 32-pixel image looks soft on a high-resolution display and crude in a Windows taskbar. A proper .ico holds several sizes, each rendered separately, and the system picks the one it needs. This page builds that from one PNG, with every size scaled from the full-resolution original rather than from a copy of a copy.
Drop PNG images here
PNG files — or any of JPEG, WebP, AVIF, BMP, ICO, TIFF, GIF or camera raw (CR2, CR3, NEF, ARW, DNG, RAF, ORF, RW2). Everything runs on this device.
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.
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: Kept. ICO stores a full alpha channel, so soft edges and cut-outs survive exactly. |
| Image quality | Preserved: Unchanged. Both formats are lossless, so every pixel comes through exactly. |
| Colour | Partly preserved: Converted to sRGB. Decoding an image colour-manages it into the browser's own space, so the output is sRGB and is left untagged, which every viewer reads as sRGB. A wide-gamut source is reported before conversion. |
| 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. |
Which sizes go in, and why
By default: 16, 24, 32, 48, 64, 128 and 256 pixels. 16 and 32 are the browser tab and the Windows taskbar; 48 is the desktop; 256 is the large-icon view and the Explorer preview pane. The rest fill in the scaling factors a high-resolution display asks for.
Sizes larger than your source image are left out rather than upscaled. An enlarged icon looks worse than a missing one, and Windows scales the nearest available size better than a blurred entry does.
Entries of 64 pixels and below are written as uncompressed bitmaps and larger ones as embedded PNG. That split is deliberate: Windows XP and a long tail of installers and icon readers do not understand a PNG inside an .ico, while a 256×256 uncompressed bitmap would be 256 kB on its own.
Start with a square, transparent PNG
Icons are square. A rectangular source is fitted inside each square with transparent padding rather than stretched, because a squashed logo is worse than a padded one — but the result is better if you crop to a square yourself first.
Transparency matters more here than almost anywhere else: an icon with a white background looks like a white sticker on a dark taskbar. The alpha channel is carried into every entry, and a one-bit mask matching it is written alongside, which is what stops the icon rendering as a black square in older shells.
Small sizes need a different drawing, not just a smaller one
This is the honest limitation of any automatic converter. A logo with fine detail, thin strokes or small text scaled down to 16 pixels becomes an unreadable smudge, and no resampling algorithm fixes that. Designers draw a separate, simplified mark for the smallest sizes.
If your 16-pixel entry looks like mud, that is what is happening, and the fix is a simpler drawing rather than a better converter.
If something goes wrong
The favicon does not appear after uploading it to a site.
Almost always caching rather than the file. Browsers cache favicons aggressively and separately from pages.
What to do: Load the icon URL directly to confirm it is being served, then hard-refresh. It is worth checking the server sends it as image/x-icon or image/vnd.microsoft.icon.
The icon has a white or black box around it.
The source PNG has no transparency — it has a solid background that looks white against a white page.
What to do: Remove the background in an image editor first. A converter cannot know which pixels you meant to be transparent.
The small sizes are illegible.
Detail loss at 16 and 24 pixels, as described above.
What to do: Simplify the artwork for small sizes, or generate an icon containing only the larger entries.
Questions
What size should my source PNG be?
256×256 or larger, square, with a transparent background. Every entry is scaled from that original, so a larger source gives cleaner small sizes.
Do I still need a favicon.ico in 2026?
For the web, a PNG or SVG favicon declared in your HTML covers current browsers, but an .ico at the site root is still what a great deal of software looks for by default, and it costs a few kilobytes. For Windows applications and shortcuts it is not optional.