Drop a PNG and get back a proper multi-size .ico. The icon is assembled in your browser, so the artwork never leaves your device.
Design tools export PNG, but the places that ask for an icon often insist on .ico: the favicon slot older browsers still probe at the site root, a Windows desktop shortcut, an installer, a WinForms or Electron build, a legacy CMS field. ICO is a container rather than a plain image, which is why renaming the extension does not work and why most editors will not save one. This page does the packaging step for you.
The converter renders your PNG at the standard icon sizes that fit inside it — 16, 32, 48, and 256 pixels — and stores every one of them in a single .ico. Windows then picks whichever size it needs for a taskbar, a tooltip, or a large-icon folder view, instead of scaling one bitmap badly. Icons are square by definition, so a rectangular PNG is centered and letterboxed rather than stretched; the padding stays transparent, as does any transparency in the source. The format itself stops at 256 pixels, so a 1024 px source is scaled down to fit — there is no way around that in an .ico.
If the goal is a full favicon set for a website, an .ico alone is only part of the job: modern browsers also want PNG sizes for the manifest, an apple-touch-icon for iOS home screens, and the matching HTML tags. The Favicon Generator here builds that whole set from a single image. Use this page when you specifically need a standalone .ico — for a desktop app, a shortcut, or a build script — and use the generator when you are wiring up a site. Either way the work happens in your browser: no upload, no account, and no cap on how many files you convert.
Every standard size that fits your PNG — 16, 32, 48, and 256 pixels. A smaller source simply gets fewer entries; nothing is upscaled past its original resolution.
No. The image is scaled to fit and centered inside a square canvas, with transparent padding on the short sides, so the proportions are preserved.
Yes. Each size inside the .ico is stored as a PNG, so an alpha channel in your source carries through — a logo with a cut-out background stays cut out.
No. The resizing, PNG encoding, and ICO packaging all run in a Web Worker in this tab. There is no server that could receive the file.