ICO to TGA Converter: Free, Private, No Upload

What actually changes in this conversion

• Both ICO and TGA are lossless, so the pixels come through unchanged.
• Transparency is preserved, including soft edges.
• EXIF, GPS and camera data are stripped on every conversion. That is good for privacy, but you lose capture dates.

About ICO: history and technical details

Introduced by Microsoft with Windows 1.0 in 1985. The modern 32-bit alpha version became standard with Windows XP (2001). Windows Vista (2007) added PNG compression inside ICO for icons larger than 48x48.

Technical: Container holds 1-65535 images. Each entry has a 16-byte directory: width, height, colour count, planes, bit count, data size, data offset. Images are BMP (DIB) or PNG. Max dimension 256x256. Typical Windows icons use 16, 32, 48, 64, 128, 256.

Real-world size: A 6-size favicon.ico is typically 15-40 KB. A single 256x256 PNG favicon is 8-15 KB. Modern best practice uses separate files for 16, 32, 180 (Apple), 192, 512 (PWA).

Popular tools: IcoFX, GIMP, Adobe Photoshop (with plugin), ImageMagick, Favicon Generator, RealFaviconGenerator.

Alternatives: PNG (single size, widely accepted), SVG (sharp at any size), favicon.ico (still needed for legacy).

About TGA: what you get

Created by Truevision in 1984 for the TARGA and VISTA graphics cards. It became a standard for video editing (Windows and Mac) and later game texture pipelines. Still widely used in Unity, Unreal and 3D tools.

Technical: 18-byte header with image type, colour map, width, height, bit depth. Types 1, 2, 3, 9, 10, 11 for uncompressed and RLE variants. Supports 8-bit indexed, 15/16-bit high colour, 24-bit truecolour, 32-bit with alpha. Bottom-left origin by default.

Real-world size: A 1024x1024 32-bit TGA is 4 MB uncompressed, 1-3 MB with RLE. A 2048x2048 texture is 16 MB uncompressed. Game engines prefer DDS or KTX2 for shipping but TGA for authoring.

Popular tools: Unity, Unreal Engine, Blender, GIMP, Adobe Photoshop, ImageMagick, NVIDIA Texture Tools.

Alternatives: DDS (better for games), KTX2 (modern GPU texture), PNG (universal), WebP (web).

Browser and software compatibility

ICO: Supported by Windows and by browsers as a favicon, but most image viewers and editors do not open it directly. TGA: Supported by game engines and 3D tools, but not displayed by browsers.

Browsers will not display TGA. It is meant for game and 3D pipelines.

Why people move away from ICO

• ICO is capped at 256 by 256 pixels, so it is of no use as a general-purpose image format.
• Many image viewers and design tools cannot open ICO directly, so you need a PNG to edit it.

Why people choose TGA

• Many game engines, 3D tools and texture pipelines still accept TGA with an alpha channel.
• The simple layout loads quickly and is easy for custom tools to parse.

Common mistakes with ICO

• Creating a favicon.ico with a single 16x16 size — looks blurry on Retina
• Using ICO for general images — 256x256 limit makes it useless
• Forgetting the .ico fallback — some old browsers still request it automatically

Best practices for keeping quality

• ICO files are tiny, often 32 by 32 pixels. Scaling them up blurs, so start from a larger original when possible.
• If your engine prefers power-of-two textures (512, 1024, 2048), resize before converting.
• Alpha is preserved, but check that the transparent areas match what your engine expects.
• Resize before converting if the image will be shown small. A 4000 pixel photo displayed at 800 pixels wastes bytes in any format.
• Check the result at 100 percent zoom, especially around text, edges and gradients, before you replace any originals.
• Keep your original files. Conversions to a lossy format cannot be undone.
• When you convert a set of images, use the same quality setting for the whole batch. The converter handles up to 20 files at once.