ICO File Format
   
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GraphicsAcademy.com  >  File Formats  >  Microsoft Windows Icon

ICO File Format

Short Name ICO
Long Name Microsoft Windows Icon
Typical File Extensions .ico
Contains Icon

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This is the format that icons are stored in, under Microsoft Windows.

Contrary to a widespread belief, these files are not the same format as BMP file format.

Each ICO file contains one or more bitmap images which may be at different pixel sizes and/or color depths. The idea of this is that programs can display the most appropriate icon for the user's screen settings.

The ICO format also allows transparency so that icons do not have to appear rectangular when displayed on screen.

On the web, the most common use of ICO files, is to create a FAVICON file.

Possibly the most common type of ICO files are those containing a single 32 by 32 pixel image with a 16 color palette (although icons with larger sizes and more colors are becoming more and more common), which are always exactly 766 bytes in size.

ICO files are not compressed. However, as the images that they contain are usually quite small, compression is not really needed anyway.

Here are some programs for working with icon files:
  • IconCool Editor Top Choice
    This is a powerful icon editor (and small web images). It has 21 image filters, including Blur, Sharpen, Emboss, Diffuse, Color Balance and more. It has also 13 image effects, including Linear Gradient, Wave, Noise, Hook, Arbitrary Rotation and more. You can change the color depth of images easily. It also has a smart image capturing tool with which you can capture various size image from desktop or any other software by striking the Ctrl key, even if the main window of the editor is minimized.

  • IconCool Top Choice
    IconCool is powerful tool to manage, extract, convert, modify, search and create icons. An icon library with dozens of samples is included. You can search the icons in the library by keyword, and add or edit the keyword of any icon. You can save icons in a variety of formats including ICO CUR GIF JPEG BMP and PNG. And you can also convert image files to icons.

  • GetIcons
    This program grabs icons from .EXE and .DLL files. You can save the icons into BMP, ICO or other file formats.

  • ImageIcon
    Converts BMP and GIF images to icons.


Related Pages on this site:
Related Software:
  • Able Graphic Manager
    Able Graphic Manager is a program that enables you to easily view, print and convert graphic files in normal (file by file) and batch (many files at a time) modes. Input formats include Drawing Interchange Format (DXF), TIFF, JPEG, BMP, RLE, PNG, WMF, EMF, TARGA, VDA, ICB, VST, PIX, PXM, PPM, PGM, PBM and ICO, CUR. Output formats include JPEG, TIFF, PCX, PNG, BMP, Targa, PXM, PPM, PGM and PBM.

  • Artful GIF Animator
    Create from scratch, import from AVI, edit and optimize your animated GIF images to develop animations for web sites. Drag and drop JPEG, BMP, GIF, ICO and even AVI files into the program and then edit and preview frames on the fly - while you are editing a frame, it animates the resulting picture. Tune up the individual position and edit the color palette for each frame, optimize animated GIFs with five different color reduction methods.

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