ICO to PNG

ICO is the Windows icon format and often holds several sizes in one file. For image editing, the web or previews you usually need a plain PNG. PNG is lossless, supports transparency and is opened everywhere.

The ICO is read locally and its largest contained image is exported as PNG; transparency is preserved. Nothing is uploaded - the conversion runs entirely in the browser.

An ICO is really a small container bundling several versions of the same symbol at different edge lengths - so Windows can grab the suitably sharp icon for the taskbar, file explorer or desktop depending on the situation. For ordinary image editing this structure is awkward, though. This tool pulls out the highest-resolution contained image and outputs it as a plain PNG you can open, crop or recolour in any editor. That comes from the format itself: the size field in the ICO directory entry is only 1 byte long (a value of 0 means 256), so entries top out at 256 pixels - that is exactly the maximum size you can extract losslessly.

Note that no sharpness arises that the icon did not contain in the first place: if the ICO holds only a 48-pixel symbol, the PNG cannot be larger and more detailed than that source. If you want to use the symbol as an icon again later, the reverse direction lets you easily build a new ICO with exactly the sizes you need.

Specifications

In 3 steps

1. Drop or tap your ICO file.
2. The tool exports the largest image as PNG.
3. Download the PNG - with no upload.

Limitations: From an ICO with several sizes the largest image is exported. ICO icons are at most 256 px (the ICO format stores the size per entry in just 1 byte; a value of 0 means 256 - the format does not provide for anything larger). The resolution cannot be increased beyond what the ICO stores by going to PNG.

FAQ

Related tools

PNG to ICO · TIFF to PNG · Compress images · ICNS to PNG · Favicon generator · TIFF to JPG · DICOM to PDF