PSD to ICO Converter

Convert PSD to ICO: What This Guide Covers

ICO is Microsoft's Windows icon container: a tiny directory of one or more small bitmaps that Windows Explorer, the taskbar, shortcut files and older browsers read as an app or site icon. Turning a Photoshop design into one is mostly a scaling problem, and this page is unusually blunt about the two things that trip people up — icons cap out at 256 pixels, and the size control here sets the height, not a square.

That second detail matters more than it sounds. Read the aspect-ratio table below before you pick a preset, especially if your artwork is wider than it is tall.

How to Convert PSD to ICO

1. Upload Your PSD File: Drag and drop the .psd onto the page or click "Add Files". Several files can be queued and converted with the same setting. .psb (Large Document Format) is not accepted here — flatten and re-save it as a standard .psd first.
2. Pick a Preset Under Image Resolution: This is the only conversion control on the page. Image resolution offers Preset Resolutions with nine entries — 256P, 192P, 180P, 128P, 64P, 48P, 32P, 24P and 16P — and each one sets the icon's height in pixels, with the width following your artwork's aspect ratio. There is deliberately no quality slider, no colour-palette control and no bit-depth selector, because the icon data is always written at full 32-bit colour.
3. Match the Preset to Your Aspect Ratio: If your design is square, any preset is safe. If it is landscape, stay at 128P or smaller — a wider-than-tall icon scaled to a taller preset ends up more than 255 pixels wide, which an ICO directory entry cannot describe. The table below shows exactly where that boundary falls.
4. Convert and Download: Click Convert and save the .ico. No sign-up, no watermark.

Preset vs Aspect Ratio: Where Landscape Artwork Breaks

An ICO directory entry stores the width and the height as a single byte each, with zero meaning 256. That is a hard limit of the file format, not of this tool. Because the preset sets height and the width is derived from your aspect ratio, a wide design can end up needing a width the directory has no room to describe — and the byte wraps around. We reproduced this with landscape sources at every preset; the "declared" column is what we read back out of the finished .ico.

The picture data itself is always written correctly — it is only the size the directory declares that is wrong, which is what an icon host reads before it decides how to draw the file. The safe rules are simple: square artwork can use any preset up to 256P; landscape artwork should use 128P or smaller; portrait artwork is always fine because its width is smaller than its height by definition.

If you need a full-width 256 px icon from a wide design, crop or pad the PSD to a square canvas in Photoshop first. That is what real app and favicon artwork does anyway — icons are square by convention on every platform.

How Big the .ico Will Be

Icon images here are stored as uncompressed 32-bit BGRA bitmaps rather than PNG-compressed entries, which is why an .ico is far larger than a PNG of the same dimensions — and why it also opens on older Windows releases that predate PNG-compressed icon support. Size scales with the pixel count: roughly width × height × 4 bytes plus a small header and transparency mask. Measured from a square source:

One extra thing worth knowing: a Photoshop document exposes its merged composite and its individual layers, and the ICO writer stores each one as a separate directory entry. In practice that means a .psd produces an .ico at least twice the size of the numbers above, and the format does not define which entry an application picks when several declare the same dimensions. If a minimal, single-entry icon matters — a favicon.ico served on every page load, for example — export the artwork to PNG first and run PNG to ICO, which produces exactly one entry.

Common Errors and How to Fix Them

• "Windows shows my icon squashed or at the wrong size" — your source is landscape and you picked a preset above 128P, so the width byte in the directory wrapped. Re-run at 128P or smaller, or make the PSD square first.
• "My icon is blurry in the taskbar" — you exported one large size and Windows is downscaling it on the fly. Real icon sets contain purpose-drawn 16, 32 and 48 px versions, because a design that reads well at 256 px turns to mush at 16 px. Convert the same artwork several times at different presets and assemble the set in an icon editor.
• "The .ico is hundreds of kilobytes" — expected at 256P, since the data is uncompressed 32-bit. Drop to 48P or 32P for a shortcut or favicon; those land in single-digit kilobytes.
• "My transparent corners are white or black" — they should not be. ICO output here is 32-bit with a real alpha channel, so PSD transparency is carried over. If the corners are filled, the transparency is missing in the composite the PSD stores — check that no background layer is visible before saving.
• "Only part of my design exported" — the conversion uses the flattened composite Photoshop stores in the file, so hidden layers are absent. Turn them on, save with "Maximize Compatibility" enabled, and upload again.
• "My browser ignores the favicon" — modern sites usually declare a PNG favicon with a <link> element instead; MDN explicitly warns against using ICO files in web content. Keep the .ico at the site root for legacy clients and add PNG icons in your HTML.

Frequently Asked Questions

Why is 256 pixels the maximum icon size?

Because the ICO directory stores each image's width and height in one byte apiece, and the convention is that a zero byte means 256. There is no room to express 257 or anything above it, so 256 × 256 is the format's hard ceiling — MDN's image-format reference states the same limit. That is also why our preset list stops at 256P: offering a larger value would only produce a file whose directory could not describe it.

Does PSD transparency survive the conversion to ICO?

Yes. Icons are written at 32 bits per pixel — 24 bits of colour plus a full 8-bit alpha channel — so both fully transparent and semi-transparent pixels come through. We checked by converting a PSD with transparent corners and reading the finished icon back: the corner pixel had an alpha value of zero while the artwork in the centre was fully opaque. This is the main practical reason to pick ICO or PNG for an icon rather than JPG, which has no alpha at all and would fill those areas with white.

The preset sets height — so how do I control the width?

You do not, directly. The width always follows your source's aspect ratio, and there is no width field on this page. The practical answer is to control the aspect ratio instead: crop or pad the PSD to a 1:1 canvas in Photoshop before uploading, and then the preset you choose is the square icon size. Every platform's icon guidelines expect square artwork, so this is the right shape to be working in regardless.

What happens to my layers, masks and text?

They are flattened. An icon image is a single raster bitmap, so layer groups, masks, adjustment layers, blend modes, live type and vector shapes are all composited into one picture during conversion, and the layer structure cannot be recovered from the .ico afterwards. Keep the .psd as your master and re-export whenever the design changes — that is a two-click round trip here, whereas rebuilding a lost layer stack is not.

Which sizes should I actually export for a Windows app icon?

The conventional set is 16, 32, 48 and 256 px, which maps to our 16P, 32P, 48P and 256P presets on square artwork. 16 px is used in title bars and list views, 32 px in the taskbar and desktop at standard DPI, 48 px on the desktop at larger scaling, and 256 px for Explorer's extra-large thumbnails. For a website favicon.ico, 16P and 32P are enough — and note that the 16 px version usually needs a simplified drawing rather than a shrunk one, because fine detail disappears entirely at that size.

Why does this page have no quality or colour-depth options?

Because there is nothing meaningful to expose. The icon data is written uncompressed at a fixed 32 bits per pixel, so there is no lossy quality knob to turn and no palette to reduce — a "quality" slider would do literally nothing. The only variable that changes the output is the pixel size, which is why the options panel shows exactly one control. Formats where quality genuinely matters, like PSD to JPG and PSD to AVIF, have full quality ladders on their own pages.

Can I put several sizes into one .ico file here?

Not from a single conversion — each run produces the icon at the one preset you chose. The ICO format itself is designed to hold multiple sizes, so the workflow is to convert your artwork at each size you need, then combine them in a dedicated icon editor such as GIMP or an icon-authoring tool. That also lets you hand-tune the small sizes, which is what separates a professional icon set from a mechanically downscaled one.

How is my file handled while it converts?

Your .psd is uploaded over an encrypted connection, flattened and rendered to an icon on our servers, and deleted automatically after a few hours — no sign-up, no watermark, never shared or made public. If your source is already a flat image rather than a layered document, PNG to ICO and JPG to ICO take the same path with one fewer flattening step.