ICO to SVG Converter

What happens when you convert ICO to SVG

• The image is decoded and written as an SVG traced from the shapes and colours of the image.
• Tracing turns areas of similar colour into vector shapes. Logos, icons and flat artwork trace cleanly and scale to any size; photographs come out posterised, because every shade becomes a separate shape.

How to convert ICO to SVG online

1. Press "Choose ICO files" and select one or more files, or drag them onto the box. You can add files of any size your device can hold in memory.
2. Adjust the settings if you need to. The output is lossless, so there is no quality setting to worry about.
3. Press "Convert to SVG". Images convert in a second or two each.
4. Save each SVG with its download button. Close the tab and every trace of the files is gone from memory.

Why convert ICO to SVG?

ICO files usually come from website favicons and Windows program icons. People convert them to SVG because SVG stays sharp at any size and is tiny for logos and icons, which makes it the standard for graphics on the web and in design tools.

In short, ICO is good at what it was made for, and SVG is the more practical choice when the file has to open, upload or print somewhere else. ICO shown by browsers as a favicon; opening one directly depends on the viewer, while SVG renders natively in every browser.

How to convert ICO to SVG on Windows, Mac, iPhone and Android

On Windows

Open this page in Chrome, Edge or Firefox, drag your ICO files in from File Explorer, and press Convert. Each SVG is saved to your Downloads folder.

On a Mac

Safari, Chrome and Firefox all work. Drag the ICO files from Finder onto the drop zone and the SVG files land in Downloads.

On iPhone and iPad

Open the page in Safari and tap Choose ICO files. You can pick from Photos or from the Files app. The converted SVG appears in Files, in the Downloads folder; to put it in your photo library, open it there, tap Share and choose Save Image.

On Android

Open the page in Chrome, tap Choose ICO files and pick them from Files or your gallery. The SVG is saved to the Download folder, where any file manager can find it.

Best settings for ICO to SVG

Two settings control the trace. Colours sets how many flat colours the SVG may use: 2 gives a black and white trace, ideal for signatures and line art; 8 to 16 suits most logos; 32 keeps more shading but produces far more shapes. Detail sets how closely the outlines follow the pixels: High keeps small features, Simple gives smoother, lighter files.

For the best result, start from the largest, cleanest version of the image you have, with a flat background. Blurry or heavily compressed JPGs trace with ragged edges, because the tracer follows the compression noise.

ICO vs SVG: the differences

About ICO and SVG files

What is an ICO file?

An ICO file is a small container that can hold several sizes of the same icon, and since Windows Vista each size may be stored as an embedded PNG. The largest size an ICO can hold is 256 by 256 pixels.

What is an SVG file?

SVG describes shapes as text instructions, so it stays sharp at any size and a simple logo can be under 5 KB. Turning it into pixels fixes it at one resolution, so choose the output size before converting.

ICO to SVG not working? Common problems

• Colours look slightly different. Browsers convert images to the standard sRGB colour space when they decode them, so wide-gamut and CMYK images can shift a little.
• A phone photo comes out upright even though it looked sideways elsewhere. That is correct: the rotation stored in the photo is applied during conversion, so the SVG is always the right way up.
• The file is bigger than expected. It depends on the artwork. A simple logo traced to SVG is often a few kilobytes; a detailed image produces thousands of shapes and a larger file than the ICO. Fewer colours give a smaller SVG.

Convert ICO to SVG from the command line

ImageMagick cannot trace pixels into vector shapes; it only wraps the image inside an SVG. The standard open-source tracer is potrace, which works on black and white bitmaps:

magick input.ico -threshold 50% input.pbm
potrace input.pbm -s -o output.svg

That gives a single-colour trace. For colour, the converter on this page traces each colour separately and combines them, without installing anything.