Format introduction | The ICO file format is an image file format for computer icons in Microsoft Windows. ICO files contain one or more small images at multiple sizes and color depths, such that they may be scaled appropriately. In Windows, all executables that display an icon to the user, on the desktop, in the Start Menu, or in Windows Explorer, must carry the icon in ICO format. | Portable Network Graphics (PNG) is a raster graphics file format that supports lossless data compression. PNG was created as an improved, non-patented replacement for Graphics Interchange Format (GIF), and is the most used lossless image compression format on the Internet. PNG itself does not support animation at all. MNG is an extension to PNG that does; it was designed by members of the PNG Group. |
Technical details | An ICO file is made up of an ICONDIR ("Icon directory") structure, containing an ICONDIRENTRY structure for each image in the file, followed by a contiguous block of all image bitmap data (which may be in either Windows BMP format, excluding the BITMAPFILEHEADER structure, or in PNG format, stored in its entirety). | PNG supports palette-based images (with palettes of 24-bit RGB or 32-bit RGBA colors), grayscale images (with or without alpha channel), and full-color non-palette-based RGB[A] images (with or without alpha channel). PNG was designed for transferring images on the Internet, not for professional-quality print graphics, and therefore does not support non-RGB color spaces such as CMYK. |
File extension | .ico | .png |
MIME | image/x-icon, image/vnd.microsoft.icon | image/png |
Developed by | Microsoft | PNG Development Group |
Type of format | Graphics file format for computer icons | lossless bitmap image format |
Associated programs | Axialis IconWorkshop, IcoFX, IconBuilder, Microangelo Toolset, Greenfish Icon Editor Pro, GIMP, ImageMagick, IrfanView, ResEdit. | Adobe Photoshop, Paint Shop Pro, the GIMP, GraphicConverter, Helicon Filter, ImageMagick, Inkscape, IrfanView, Pixel image editor, Paint.NET, Xara Photo & Graphic Designer. |
Wiki | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ICO_(file_format) | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portable_Network_Graphics |