Convert TIFF to ICO

The gap between the two ends of this conversion is larger than on any other icon page. A logo delivered for print is typically 300 dpi and several thousand pixels across, sitting on a generous margin, often with a tagline set underneath it. An icon is at most 256 pixels and is usually seen at 16 or 32 — a favicon in a browser tab, a shortcut on a desktop, an entry in a taskbar.

Scaling handles the pixel count and cannot handle the composition. A mark that reads beautifully on a letterhead becomes a grey smudge at 32 pixels if it includes a tagline, a thin rule or an outlined typeface. Crop the TIFF to the symbol alone before converting — drop the wordmark, drop the margin, drop anything thinner than about a fortieth of the width — and the result will be a recognisable icon rather than a faithful miniature of something unreadable. That five-minute crop is worth more than every option on this page.

Whatever arrives, the image is scaled so its longest edge is no more than 256 pixels before it is written. That is the format’s own ceiling rather than a policy: the ICO directory stores each image’s width and height in a single byte, and 256 is recorded as zero because 256 does not fit in a byte. Every Windows since Vista reads that convention correctly.

Each size in the file is then made from that 256-pixel image in one filtered pass onto a square canvas, so a 3,000-pixel print file does not come out aliased and a non-square mark is centred with transparent space rather than stretched. What it does come out is simplified: features narrower than roughly a hundredth of the image width average away entirely. If the icon has to be sharp at 32 pixels specifically, the better route is still to prepare a 32-pixel version deliberately in an editor, because a downscale from 3,000 pixels and a purpose-drawn 32-pixel icon are visibly different things.

TIFF holds several images per file and so does ICO — that is what the format is for, since a proper icon file carries 16, 32, 48 and 256-pixel versions of the same artwork so that each context can pick the one it wants. The comparison table on this page reports both facts correctly about the formats, and this conversion honours exactly one of them.

The TIFF reader takes page one and stops, so a multi-page file quietly loses everything after it — check which page the logo is on before converting a brand pack that also contains a mono version and a reversed one. The ICO writer, on the other hand, emits the whole set: one directory entry per size, three by default at 48, 32 and 16, each its own PNG. So the asymmetry runs the way you want. A print file that is only ever going to give up one image gives it up into a container that then carries it at every size a browser or a taskbar will ask for.

An ICO can hold either raw bitmaps or PNGs, and this one holds a PNG per size. That is the modern convention, it produces a file a fraction of the size of the raw-bitmap alternative, and it brings a real 8-bit alpha channel with it — so a logo cut out of its background stays cut out, with soft anti-aliased edges rather than a jagged one-bit mask.

This is the strongest reason to convert a logo rather than a photograph into an icon. A favicon sits on whatever colour the browser’s tab strip happens to be, and it changes between light and dark themes; a mark on an opaque white square looks like a mistake in dark mode. If the TIFF does not have a transparent background but the artwork is on flat white, removing that background before converting is worth doing.

A print TIFF is frequently CMYK with an ICC profile attached, and that combination is what makes it printable. The reader here converts CMYK to screen colour with a fixed formula rather than through the profile, so the icon is recognisably the brand and not exactly it — usually a little flat where the profile would have lifted the deep tones, and slightly off on saturated corporate reds and blues.

For a 32-pixel tab icon nobody will notice. For a brand where the colour is the asset, it is worth doing the conversion properly: open the TIFF in Photoshop, Affinity or GIMP, convert to sRGB with the correct profile, export an RGB copy, and bring that here. It is also worth doing if the same artwork is going to be used elsewhere on the site, because a favicon that does not match the header logo is a visible inconsistency.

Sixteen bits per channel are reduced to eight by keeping the high byte, which is invisible at icon size. Layers are flattened into the composite. EXIF, XMP, IPTC and any ICC profile are dropped — every image conversion here decodes to raw pixels and re-encodes, so that happens on its own and no setting on the page prevents it.

The size drops accordingly and steeply. This site’s own 480 by 320 samples are 615,400 bytes as TIFF, and an icon derived from print artwork lands in single-digit kilobytes because it is a few hundred pixels of PNG behind a directory of a few dozen bytes. The default three-size set is normally the smaller file as well as the better icon — three small PNGs of a flat mark measured 1,062 bytes against 2,229 for one 256-pixel entry. Either way the file has no performance implications at all, which is one less thing on a launch checklist.

For a website, put it at the root as /favicon.ico. Browsers request that path whether or not anything in the markup points at it, and a 404 for it is one of the most common lines in a server log. Adding a link element in the head as well does no harm and makes the intention explicit.

For a Windows shortcut, right-click the shortcut, choose Properties, then Change Icon, and point it at the file. For an application, the build tool usually wants a multi-size ICO and will say so — choose "All common sizes" and it gets one, 256 down to 16, from this page rather than from a separate icon tool. Modern browsers will also take a PNG or an SVG as a favicon through a link element, which is worth knowing: the ICO is required only for the bare /favicon.ico request and for Windows itself.

If the mark also exists as vector — an SVG, an EPS, an AI file in the same brand pack — use that instead. Vector artwork is rendered rather than resampled on the way in, so the edges are antialiased once instead of twice, and it sidesteps the CMYK problem entirely because an SVG carries screen colour already. Digging through the handover folder for it is usually a better use of ten minutes than tuning anything here.

If the goal is not really an icon, the sibling pages are more likely to be right: TIFF to PNG for a logo that has to go into a document or a slide with its transparency intact, TIFF to WebP for one that has to go on a web page, and TIFF to SVG if the artwork needs to be traced back into shapes for signage or cutting. ICO is for the narrow set of places that genuinely require the container.

utif2 decodes the TIFF, the image is scaled and encoded as a PNG once per size, and a six-byte header plus sixteen bytes of directory per entry are written around them — all in your browser, with nothing uploaded. On this page that is worth stating plainly, because the file is nearly always a logo somebody owns and often one that has not been published yet.

The free limit is 100 MB per file, well beyond any print logo. Batches work if you have several marks to convert — drop a folder, take a ZIP — though most people on this page have exactly one file and one checklist item. The PNG encoder is shared with the rest of the site’s image pipeline, so the icon is compressed with oxipng on the way out rather than left at whatever the encoder first produced.