ICO to JPG

Some upload forms, slide tools, ticket systems and older document editors accept only JPG. An icon file (.ico) is none of these: it is a container with several sizes, usually transparent. This tool takes the largest image inside the icon and saves it as a JPG on a background color of your choice.

Which image is used

Icons hold the same artwork at different sizes. The converter sorts them and uses the biggest by default, since that one has the most detail. A note under the file lists all the sizes it found. Switch on “Save every icon size” if you want each one as a separate JPG, for example to build a contact sheet of an icon set.

Filling the transparent background

JPG has no transparency. Every transparent or partly transparent pixel is blended with the background color you pick, white unless you change it. Soft edges are mixed smoothly with that color, which looks right on a matching background and slightly haloed on a very different one. If you need to place the icon on several backgrounds, convert it to PNG with ICO to PNG instead.

Size expectations

A 256-pixel icon becomes a JPG of a few kilobytes; a 32-pixel favicon, less than one kilobyte. These are small enough for any form. If a form requires a minimum size, such as 300 × 300 pixels, it is better to recreate the logo from a larger original than to upscale an icon; Upscale Image can help a little when no original exists.

Steps

Drop one or more .ico files, set the background color and quality, and convert. Save each JPG or download them together as a .zip. The preview below the list shows the first result so you can check the background color before downloading everything.

Quality setting

At icon sizes, JPEG artifacts appear quickly around sharp edges and text. Keep the quality at 90 percent or higher; the files stay tiny either way. If edges still look smudged, the content is better served by PNG, which has no artifacts at all.

Related tools

To make an icon from a picture rather than the other way round, use JPG to ICO or PNG to ICO. A complete set of website icons, including the PNG sizes used by phones and the web manifest, comes from the Favicon Generator.

Why icons come out cropped or padded

Icons are square. A wide logo inside an icon was already padded with transparent space when the icon was made, and that padding becomes background color in the JPG. If you need a tight crop, trim the result with Crop Image after converting; the empty margin disappears and the logo fills the frame.

Several icons at once

When you document an application or a website, you may need a dozen icons as JPGs for a manual or a support article. Drop all the .ico files together; each produces one JPG from its largest image, all on the same background color so they look consistent on the page. The .zip keeps the original names, which makes it easy to match each picture to its feature. If the icons differ a lot in their largest size, resize them to a common width afterwards with Resize Image.