How it works
How the Favicon Generator works
Make a complete favicon set — favicon.ico, PNGs and apple-touch-icon — from an image, text or emoji. Everything is generated in your browser; nothing uploads.
Try Favicon Generator nowThe method
Your source is drawn onto a 512px canvas, then scaled to each target size with high-quality resampling. The favicon.ico is byte-assembled here as a real ICO container packing PNGs for 16, 32 and 48px, valid since Windows Vista. The apple-touch-icon is flattened onto a solid background because iOS ignores alpha. Nothing leaves your browser.
Step by step
- 1
Pick a source: upload an image, type up to three characters, or choose an emoji.
- 2
Check the live browser-tab preview in light and dark chrome — a favicon must survive both.
- 3
Adjust colours and shape until the 16px version still reads clearly.
- 4
Download the files individually or grab the whole set as one ZIP.
- 5
Paste the HTML snippet into your <head> and drop the files in your site root.
What it doesn't do
- No SVG output — that needs real vector source art, not a rasterised wrapper.
- Detailed photos and busy logos turn to mud at 16px; simplify the source if the preview looks smudged.
- Emoji artwork comes from your device’s fonts, so it can look different on other platforms.
Frequently asked
Which favicon sizes do I actually need in 2026?
Four files cover everything: favicon.ico with 16/32/48px inside for browser tabs and legacy lookups, a 180px apple-touch-icon for iOS home screens, and 192px + 512px PNGs declared in site.webmanifest for Android and PWA installs. The dozens of sizes older tools produced are obsolete — platforms scale from these.
Where do the downloaded files go on my site?
Put all of them in the web root so they resolve at /favicon.ico, /icon-192.png and so on, then paste the HTML snippet into the <head> of every page. Browsers also probe /favicon.ico directly even without a link tag, which is why the root location matters.
Why is my new favicon not showing up?
Caching. Browsers cache favicons aggressively — sometimes for weeks — and a normal reload does not refetch them. Do a hard refresh, open the site in a private window to confirm the new file is live, or temporarily add a query string like /favicon.ico?v=2 to the link tag to force a refetch.
Is my image uploaded to a server?
No. The file is read, cropped, resized and encoded entirely inside your browser tab using the canvas API, and the ICO and ZIP containers are byte-assembled in JavaScript on your machine. Nothing — not the image, not even its filename — is transmitted anywhere.
Is a PNG inside a .ico file really valid?
Yes. The ICO container has accepted PNG payloads alongside classic BMP data since Windows Vista (2007), and every modern browser and OS reads them. PNG payloads are also much smaller than uncompressed 32-bit BMPs, which keeps the multi-size favicon.ico only a few kilobytes.
Can I legally use an emoji as my favicon?
Generally yes for the common sets: the emoji artwork bundled with major operating systems is licensed for rendering text, and open sets like Twemoji and Noto Emoji are explicitly free to use commercially with attribution. If your brand depends on it, verify the licence of the specific emoji font your system rendered.
Need this built into your business?
This tool is free because it's a small, solved problem. If what you actually need is bigger — what Scult builds, built and maintained for you — that's Scult's day job.
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