Turn a JPG logo or photo into a Windows icon file without installing anything. The .ico is built on your own machine.
Brand assets and stock artwork usually arrive as JPG, while the thing that needs them — a desktop shortcut, an installer script, a Windows application, an old CMS favicon field — asks for .ico. Those are not interchangeable: an .ico is a small archive holding several renderings of the same picture, so a renamed .jpg is rejected outright. This page builds the archive properly from whatever JPG you drop in.
Two rules come from the icon format, not from this tool. Icons are square, so a landscape or portrait JPG is scaled to fit and centered with transparent padding filling the rest — the alternative would be squashing your artwork. And ICO entries stop at 256 pixels, so a 4000-pixel photo is scaled down; no setting lifts that ceiling. Within those rules the converter writes the standard sizes that fit your source — 16, 32, 48, and 256 — into one file, so Windows always has a clean rendering for a taskbar button or a large folder icon.
JPG has no alpha channel, so the picture itself is fully opaque: you get a solid square of artwork, not a shape floating on nothing. Only the letterbox padding around a non-square image is transparent. If you want an icon whose background disappears against the desktop, start from a PNG with real transparency instead. Detail is the other thing to watch — a photograph shrunk to 16 pixels becomes an unreadable smudge, so simple, high-contrast artwork makes far better icons. Everything runs in a Web Worker on your device; queue as many JPGs as you like and take the results one by one or as a ZIP.
Because ICO is a container format with its own header and image directory, not a plain bitmap. Windows reads that structure and rejects a renamed JPG.
No. The ICO format caps entries at 256×256, so larger sources are scaled down to fit. That is a limit of the format, not of this tool.
Only the padding around a non-square image. JPG stores no transparency, so the artwork itself stays opaque — convert from a PNG if you need a see-through background.
No. Decoding the JPG and writing the .ico both happen in your browser, with no upload step and no account required.