ICO Converter

A brand is recognized by the logo their products or services have on them and with the world moving briskly towards graphic designing and digital businesses, the need for digital logos has increased many folds. Many designing sites provide the logos in different picture formats and converting these formats into recognizable files for software design become a nuisance as .ICO files work best for GUI Icons.

Our ICO Converter is specifically designed to be your helper in this domain and provide you the required format without you having to go through any other hustle. This saves you a lot of work and time to go through different software conversion tools, as well as providing a user-friendly interface and a number of options for conversion.

Before we get into the guide for our ICO Converter tool, let us introduce to you some basic information about ICO files.

What is an ICO file?

An .ICO file format is a Microsoft Windows symbol for computer icons. This symbol is a little graphical picture, addressing a particular file type, application, framework activity, etc. An ICO document typically gives a bunch of similar symbols for various presentation modes. It contains bitmap pictures of various sizes i.e., 16×16, 32×32, 48×48, and so on with different color depths of up to 32-bit.

The .ICO extension basically indicates the Microsoft Icon (ICO) file configuration and type. ICO is a restrictive document design created by Microsoft for Microsoft (MS) Windows GUI symbols. ICO is basically the same as the CUR (Microsoft Cursor) file format for mouse pointers.

Bitmaps:

Each picture in an ICO document with under 32 bits of color depth stores two bitmaps:

1. The AND bitmap - The picture cover which figures out which portion of the symbol is transparent.
2. The XOR bitmap - Contains the symbol which is mapped onto the image mask. Pictures with 32 bits of colors are 24-bit images with 8-bit channels for alpha compositing purposes.

Websites and ICO:

Favicon.ico is a file that stores a little site logo that appears in several areas of a web browser, including the address bar, site bookmark, history results, search bars and browser’s tabs. One of its main purposes is to make it easier for users to find your page when they have many tabs open. Favicons are not to be confused with logos, though they are often used interchangeably.The favicon.ico picture should be a 16x16 pixel icon and work best as simple graphics or text with one to three characters.

How to use our ICO Converter?

We have made our GUI as simple as possible but that will not cost you the liberty of choosing different options for file conversion. In ICO Converter, we provide all the essential options required by our users to convert their files into .ICO format. This guide is divided in two parts, one is for file insertion, and the other is for file conversion. We will provide brief instructions and information on both parts.

a) File Insertion:

ICO Converter provides two options for file insertion. This gives our users the freedom to save their files wherever they want, whether on their personal computers or on any online platform with a URL linked to it.

From device:

In case you have saved your file on your computer, follow these steps to upload your file from your computer.

1. Make sure you have chosen the right uploading option by going to the right most bottom corner of the dotted box. If it reads Use Remote URL, you are at the right place. Otherwise click on it, the option will change.
2. Go to the Choose File button and click on it.
3. It will open your file explorer. Browse the location where your files are kept, and choose any image file that you want to convert to .ICO file. Click on Open to proceed.
4. Your file name along its format extension will be shown in the box alongside Choose File Make sure its name and extension is correct as per your requirement.

From URL:

Most of the times the file is saved online, or you have found some picture on a website with different picture format and before downloading, you want to directly download the file in ICO format. Follow these steps to directly download the file from the website in ICO format.

1. Make sure you have chosen the right file choosing option by going to the right most bottom corner of the dotted box. If it reads Upload from Device, you are at the right place. Otherwise click on it, the option will change.
2. To type in the link, you can either type the whole link, or press [Ctrl + V] if you have copied the link before or simply click on paste button (Clipboard icon) at the right side of the box.

b) File Conversion:

After you have selected the file as guided above, the next step is to convert your file using the options provided in our ICO converter. To select your file conversion option, follow these steps:

1. Go to the dropdown menu provided under the Icon Size
2. Click on the drop down menu and it will show a range of icon sizes. Select any of the sizes from the menu as per your need. Your selected size will be shown on the drop down menu bar.
3. Go to the Convert button and click on it to convert your file into your required size.
4. Click on the Download button to download your .ICO file.

Why should you use this tool?

We have made the file conversion as easier as it can get. You can have your file converted into ICO format using two uploading mediums. We provide a vast number of size range selection that helps our user meet their needs to a wide variety of their requirements. This is because, convenience of our users is our utmost priority.

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