How to Convert ICO to PNG (Extracting Website Favicons)

When you open a brand new tab in Google Chrome, look closely at the tiny graphic sitting right next to the website name.

If you are a web developer or graphic designer, you know exactly what that graphic is called. It is a favicon. And if you have ever been hired to completely redesign a legacy website, you have experienced the absolute headache of trying to extract that tiny logo from the site’s root directory.

You inspect the website code, find the image file, and download it to your desktop. But instead of a standard image file, you receive an incredibly strange .ico file.

You try to open it in Figma to trace it. It refuses to import. You try pulling it into Adobe Illustrator or Canva. Both reject it as an unrecognized file format. To actually use the tiny graphic you just downloaded, you have to convert the ICO to a PNG.

What exactly is an ICO file?

The ICO format was invented for the Windows 1.0 operating system in 1985. It is essentially an icon container specifically designed for Microsoft software and web browsers.

Unlike a standard image file, a single .ico file can actually hold multiple different images at multiple different resolutions (for instance, a 16x16 pixel version, a 32x32 version, and a 64x64 version all crammed into one single file). This allowed early web browsers to seamlessly switch between resolving the perfect icon size depending on what the user was doing.

While this container system was brilliant in 1995, modern graphic design software absolutely hates parsing it today.

The fastest way to crack open an ICO file

Because an ICO file holds older graphics, almost everyone wants to convert them to a modern transparent PNG.

You might be tempted to just change the file extension name on your desktop from .ico to .png and prey that Photoshop accepts it. This strategy rarely works, and usually completely corrupts the image data. You actually have to convert the container properly.

Here is how you crack open these legacy icon files using a free local tool:

1. Launch the GetAnyFile Image Converter in your web browser. This tool uses WebAssembly, so your graphics never upload to a cloud server.
2. Select the specific ICO to PNG Converter.
3. Drag that stubborn .ico favicon you extracted from the legacy website onto the page.
4. Finalize the output container to PNG.
5. Click Convert.

The local transcoder engine instantly strips away the outdated Windows wrapping and gives you a perfectly clean, transparent PNG graphic. The PNG format flawlessly preserves the crucial transparency layer surrounding the logo. You can now freely drop the graphic directly into Figma, Photoshop, or whatever design tool you prefer to perfectly recreate the client’s logo.