ICO to PNG Converter

Convert ICO to PNG and extract every icon size

An .ico file isn’t one image but a small library of them: the same icon drawn at 16, 32, 48 and 256 pixels, sometimes at several colour depths, so Windows and browsers can pick the best one for each place it appears. Most viewers show you just one. This ICO to PNG converter reads the icon’s directory and saves every embedded image as its own transparent PNG, so you can choose exactly the sizes you need.

It handles both kinds of entry an ICO can contain — modern PNG-compressed images and classic Windows bitmaps from 1-bit to 32-bit colour with their separate transparency mask — and it opens .cur cursor files too. Pick the sizes, then download one PNG or a ZIP. Everything runs in your browser, and the file isn’t uploaded.

How to convert ICO to PNG

1. Drop one or more .ico or .cur files on the upload area, or click to choose them.
2. Under Sizes, choose Each size once (best colour depth), Largest size only or Every embedded image.
3. Leave Keep transparent areas ticked so the PNGs keep their see-through background.
4. Each image appears as a card with its dimensions and how it was stored, for example “32-bit BMP entry”. Untick the sizes you don’t want.
5. Press a card’s Download button, or the ZIP button above the cards to save every ticked size — names look like favicon-32x32.png.

ICO to PNG Converter features

What’s inside an ICO file

An ICO file starts with a six-byte header and a directory with one 16-byte entry per image, recording its width, height, colour depth, size and position in the file. The images themselves come in two flavours:

• BMP (DIB) entries — the classic format used since early versions of Windows. Each holds the colour image followed by a 1-bit AND mask that marks transparent pixels. Since Windows XP, 32-bit entries also carry a full alpha channel for smooth edges.
• PNG entries — supported since Windows Vista and used mostly for 256 × 256 images, because they are far smaller than an uncompressed bitmap of that size.

Choosing which sizes to keep

Icons often contain the same size more than once at different colour depths — a 32 × 32 image in 4-bit, 8-bit and 32-bit colour, for example, left over from the days of 16-colour screens. “Each size once (best colour depth)” keeps only the richest version of each size, which is what you want almost every time. “Every embedded image” gives you all of them, with the colour depth added to the file name.

Need a single image for a website, document or app listing? “Largest size only” saves just the biggest one. Scaling a 16-pixel icon up never looks good, so always start from the largest size available.

Making new icons

Going the other way — creating a favicon.ico from a logo — is what the Favicon Generator does, along with the PNG sizes and HTML tags a modern website needs. To resize an extracted PNG, use the Image Resizer; if your source artwork is an SVG, the SVG to PNG converter gives you sharp PNGs at any size. And if a form insists on JPG, the ICO to JPG converter places the icon on a background colour of your choice.