Make a favicon from a picture

Turn a logo into favicon.ico plus the PNG sizes iOS and Android ask for. Free, no account, and the image is converted in your browser rather than uploaded.

Drop a file here

or paste from the clipboard

Options
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Space left around the artwork. A logo drawn to the very edge of its file usually wants some; one that already has a margin does not.

Leave this off to keep transparency, which is what a favicon usually wants. Turn it on for artwork that only works on a solid background.

#ffffff

Only used when a colour is being put behind the artwork.

Results appear here. Nothing is uploaded.

    How it works

    The picture is drawn into a square canvas once per size, fitted rather than stretched so the longer side sets the scale and the shorter one is centred. The three small sizes are then packed into an ICO, which is not an image format but a directory: a header, one table entry per frame, and the PNG frames themselves appended after it. The larger sizes are written out as separate PNG files, because that is the form the platforms asking for them name in a manifest or a link tag.

    What to watch out for

    Detail disappears at sixteen pixels

    A favicon in a browser tab is about the size of a full stop on a printed page. A wordmark, a strapline or a logo with fine lines becomes an indistinct smudge at that scale whatever the source resolution. The icons that work are a single letter, a simple shape or a bold silhouette — which usually means simplifying the artwork rather than shrinking it.

    A square is assumed, and most logos are not square

    An icon is square everywhere it is used, so a wide logo is fitted inside one with space above and below it. That is the honest result, and it means a horizontal wordmark ends up small in the middle of the frame. A cropped detail of the logo almost always makes a better icon than the whole thing.

    The files are made, the wiring is yours

    What comes back is favicon.ico and three PNGs. Where they go and how they are declared depends on your site — the ICO at the root path, an apple-touch-icon link for iOS, and the two larger PNGs named in a web app manifest for Android. Nothing here writes that markup for you or guesses at your directory layout.

    Limits

    Files up to about 20 MB work reliably. Beyond that, the ceiling is your device's memory rather than any rule we impose — the work happens on your own machine. Tested in Chrome 140, Firefox 143, Safari 18.

    The set, and why it is this set

    A favicon stopped being one file some time ago, but it has not become thirty either. Four cover essentially everything in use.

    favicon.ico holds three frames at 16, 32 and 48 pixels. The root path is still probed directly by crawlers and older clients that never read a link tag, and ICO is what search results render most dependably.

    icon-180.png is what iOS uses when somebody adds a site to their home screen. icon-192.png and icon-512.png are the two sizes an Android web app manifest declares, the first for the launcher and the second for the splash screen.

    Anything beyond those is decoration, and a folder of thirty files makes the four that matter harder to find.

    Fitted, never stretched

    Icons are square. Logos usually are not. Given a wide mark, this scales it until the longer side fits and centres the shorter one, leaving the rest of the square empty — or filled, if you have asked for a background colour.

    The alternative is to stretch, and a squashed logo is worse than a margin.

    What an ICO actually is

    It is worth knowing, because it explains why this needs no encoder. An ICO is a container: six bytes of header, sixteen bytes of directory entry per frame, then the frames one after another. Since Windows Vista a frame may be a PNG stored as-is, so there is no separate bitmap format to write, no upside-down row order and no transparency mask to compute.

    The same code builds this site’s own favicon at build time.

    Made here, not somewhere else

    Your logo is decoded, drawn and encoded inside this browser tab. It is not uploaded, which for artwork that has not been announced yet is the difference between a design decision and a disclosure.

    Your files never leave your browser. Last updated 2026-08-07.