Convert JPG to ICO in your browser
Turn a JPEG into a real icon file with the sizes Windows and browsers ask for. Each size is drawn from your original. Nothing leaves this tab.
or browse your device. Everything is processed on this device
A PNG keeps its transparent background all the way into the icon, which a JPG cannot do. It is the better source for anything with a shaped edge.
Convert a PNG to ICOHow to convert JPG to ICO
A square crop works best, and .jpeg files are the same thing under a longer name. Nothing is uploaded.
The default writes 16, 32 and 48. Add the larger sizes if this is a desktop or application icon rather than a favicon.
Look at the 16px result before you ship it. A photograph that reads perfectly at full size often turns to mud at the size a tab actually draws.
A photograph makes a difficult icon
An icon is drawn at 16 pixels across in a browser tab. That is not a small picture, it is a different medium: there is room for one shape and about two colours, and any detail finer than that becomes noise. A logo survives it because a logo was designed for it. A photograph of a person, a building or a product usually does not.
If the JPG is a photo you have to use, crop it hard before converting. Fill the frame with the single most recognisable element, drop the background entirely, and raise the contrast further than looks right at full size. What you are aiming for is something identifiable as a shape, because at 16px a shape is all anyone will see.
The other thing a JPG brings is that it has no transparency. JPEG has no alpha channel at all, so a photo converted to an icon arrives as a full square with whatever background it had. If you need the icon to sit on a page without a visible box around it, you need a PNG with a transparent background as the source, not a JPG.
JPG to ICO FAQ
Can I get a transparent background from a JPG?
No, and no tool can. JPEG has no alpha channel, so the transparency was never in the file to recover. The picture itself carries whatever background the photo had, and the only transparency you get is the bars either side of a non-square crop. If the icon needs to sit on a page without a box around it, start from a PNG with real transparency instead.
Why does my icon look blurry at 16px?
Because there are 256 pixels in the whole image and your photograph needs more than that to be legible. This is the format, not the conversion. Crop tighter before converting so that one recognisable shape fills the frame, and raise the contrast further than looks correct at full size.
Does it work with .jpeg files?
Yes. JPG and JPEG are the same format with two spellings, a hangover from filenames once being limited to three characters. Drop either one.
My photo is not square. What happens to it?
It is scaled to fit inside the square and centred, with the space around it left transparent, so nothing is cropped away without you asking. For a photograph that usually is not what you want, because it leaves the picture small in the frame. Crop it square first and the whole icon is your image.
Why is the .ico bigger than my JPG?
Because it holds several images rather than one, and because those entries are stored as PNG rather than JPEG. PNG is lossless and a photograph is the worst case for it, so a photo icon is noticeably heavier than a logo icon of the same dimensions. Cutting the colours slider is the lever that helps most here.
Are my JPG files uploaded to convert them?
No. The JPG is decoded and the ICO is written by your own browser, in this tab. There is no upload endpoint in the site for a file to go to, which you can check in your network tools: convert something and watch that no request carries it. Disconnect from the network after the page loads and it still works.
Does this remove EXIF, GPS and AI metadata?
Yes, every time, and there is no way to turn it off. The image is decoded to pixels and encoded again from those pixels alone, so EXIF and GPS, the XMP packet, embedded colour profiles, and any Content Credentials or AI-generation tags the file arrived with do not survive. There is no switch for this, because there is no way to keep them. What no compressor can remove is a watermark written into the pixels themselves, such as the invisible marks some image generators add: those survive re-encoding here and everywhere else.
Related
Same format joins the queue. Anything else re-routes to its own tool.