1Upload the ICO icons you want to work on; the file opens on an editable canvas in your browser with nothing installed.
2Crop, rotate, resize, draw, add text and shapes, or adjust colour — every change lands on a working copy, never on your upload.
3Preview the result at full size before you commit to it.
4Export back to ICO, or to a lossless format instead if you are still part-way through editing.
ICO Editor FAQ
What can I actually change?
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Crop, rotate, flip, resize, draw, add text and shapes, and apply filters and colour adjustments. Everything is applied to a working copy, so the file you uploaded is never modified in place.
Does the file format limit what the editor can do?
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It does. ICO is a container that holds several square bitmaps at once (16, 32, 48, 64, 128 and 256 px) so Windows and browsers can pick the size they need. What the format can represent bounds what any editor can preserve, here or on the desktop.
Is anything lost when I export?
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Only what the export format cannot represent. Choose a lossless output while you are still iterating and a compressed one when you are finished — exporting to a lossy format between edit sessions is what accumulates damage.
Is my file uploaded, or does editing happen locally?
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Editing happens in your browser; the file goes to our workers only for the operations that genuinely need server-side processing, and it is deleted shortly afterwards.
Will ICO Editor lower the quality of my ICO icons?
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The sizes stored inside an ICO are lossless bitmaps, so the pixels themselves do not degrade. What actually decides how good an icon looks is whether the size the operating system asks for exists in the stack — a 256 px entry downscaled on the fly by Windows always looks worse than a real 32 px entry.
Which sizes should the icon contain?
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16, 32 and 48 pixels cover Windows Explorer and browser tabs; 256 covers large-icon view and modern shortcuts. Keeping all of them in one file costs almost nothing and stops the operating system from having to guess.
Does ICO Editor cost anything?
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No. ICO Editor is free with no account, and the output carries no watermark — which matters more here than anywhere else, since an icon is a handful of pixels with nowhere to hide one.
What can I upload to ICO Editor?
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ICO files containing one or several sizes, plus ordinary PNG or JPG artwork if you are building an icon rather than editing one. Windows .ico and browser favicon files are the same format.
Why does a PDF site host ICO Editor?
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PDF.to exists because PDF is where documents go to be shared and the worst place to keep them while they are still being worked on, so nearly every job here is about getting something into or out of that state deliberately. A document rarely arrives in the state it needs to leave in: it is too big, in the wrong order, locked, or a scan with no text in it. ICO Editor sits on the same upload and the same account as the conversions because those jobs turn up together.
What should I do with the result once ICO Editor is finished?
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The converter on this site moves documents between PDF, Word, images, plain text and eBook formats in either direction, so whatever comes out of a tool here has somewhere to go next without a second upload. Running that after ICO Editor rather than before keeps the document structure intact through the step that is most likely to flatten it.
Is ICO Editor here the same tool the sibling sites run?
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The engines are shared — the same document toolchain, the same workers, the same limits. What a PDF site adds is a view on when a file should stay a document and when it genuinely wants to become something else, which is the decision most tools quietly make for you. It also starts from one fact about the format this site is named after: a PDF is an object graph, not a page image, so text stays selectable and vectors stay sharp no matter what happens to the raster content inside it.
Do I need an account, and does anything get kept?
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No account, and nothing is kept: uploads are deleted from the workers shortly after the job finishes, nothing is read and nothing is indexed. Free accounts exist for history and batch size, not for access.
