creating a favicon with Photoshop or Illustrator

[ursulak97070300]

Hi at all,

 I have to create a favicon (ico.) file and have no idea to do so in Illustrator or in Photoshop. Help would be perfect.

Thanks

Ursula

[didiermazier · Accepted solution]

You can make a square image  16px/16px (or up to 64/64)

save as pict file then manually rename the suffix to .ico.

I do not think the .ico format is still mandatory…

You can use this syntax on a WP site  :

<link rel="icon" type="image/png" href="favicon.png">

Or you can save as a PNG and use : https://www.icoconverter.com/

[ursulak97070300]

Hi perfect thank you. I used an online converter now like you suggested.

[syzygymedia]

Brilliant! That worked perfectly.

[SundayGladiator]

Just wanted to point out in 2025 Ps and AI there is no pict file save option anymore.

Gonna try PNG export then change file name to '.ico'.

[Trevor.Dennis · Accepted solution]

It's a long time since I used it, but the favicon Photoshop plugin on the telegraphics site is what we all used.  

www.telegraphics.com.au/svn/icoformat/trunk/dist/README.html

Something I do still use it for is to create drive icons for Windows.

By creating this tiny text file and placing it in the root directory of any drive and naming the file autorun.inf

In this case Projects.ico is the name of the icon I want displayed for that drive (up to 256 X 256 pixels)

The icon file Projects.ico  also goes in the root directory of the drive

As you can see, this image is full size, but will only display according to the location it is used in (If I am remembering this correctly)

This is how it looks in File Explorer

You can see from Drive G: that it does not pay to be too ambitious with the icon's complexity.  It looked fine when I made it at 256 x 256 pixels, but gets messed up at lower resolutions.

[EDIT] Note the .ico files will not open in Photoshop unless the favicon plugin is installed.

[ursulak97070300]

Hi thank you very much for this detailed infos. Yes this was my expierence as well, keep it simple.