Favicon Generator — Free, Fast & Private
A favicon is the smallest branding surface a website has and the one users see most often: it sits in every browser tab, every bookmark list, every history entry, and every phone home screen shortcut. It is also the surface with the messiest requirements, because four different platforms grew four different conventions for it. This tool collapses that mess into one step — drop a single image and it renders the complete standard set, packs the classic favicon.ico, and writes the HTML for you.
Everything happens in your browser through the Canvas API and MiniPx's shared encoder. Your logo is never uploaded, which matters more than it sounds: favicon generators are a popular place to hand over unreleased logos and draft brand marks, and most competing tools receive that artwork on their servers. Here you can switch off your connection after the page loads and the generator keeps working.
The sizes a modern site actually needs
Favicon advice online tends to list fifteen or twenty sizes, most of them fossils. In practice, current browsers and platforms are served completely by seven files. The workhorses are 16×16 and 32×32 — standard and high-density browser tabs — with 48×48 covering desktop shortcuts and older Windows surfaces; those three travel together inside favicon.ico. Apple devices ignore all of that and request apple-touch-icon.png at 180×180 for home-screen bookmarks. Android and the web app manifest want 192×192 for the install icon and 512×512 for the splash screen. That is the whole list. Anything else — 57px and 114px apple-touch variants, Windows tiles, Opera Coast — belongs to platforms that no longer exist or now fall back to the sizes above.
Why one 512px source is enough
Every file in the set is a downscale of one master, so the only input that matters is a single square image at 512×512 or larger — a PNG with transparency is ideal, and if yours has a background you want gone, the background remover can strip it first. The generator downscales in halving steps rather than one jump, which keeps thin strokes from aliasing into grey mush at 16px, and it pads non-square sources onto a transparent square instead of cropping or stretching them. What no tool can automate is judgement at tiny sizes: a wordmark that reads beautifully at 512px is illegible at 16px. If your logo has fine detail, the honest fix is a simplified mark — an initial, a symbol — as the favicon source, and the preview grid on this page is where you find that out before your visitors do.
Installing the set: files, snippet, manifest
Upload the downloaded files to your site root, then paste the generated snippet into the <head> of every page — most sites do this once in a shared layout or template. The snippet declares favicon.ico for legacy and default lookups, the 16 and 32px PNGs for browsers that prefer them, and the apple-touch-icon for iOS. The two android-chrome PNGs are not linked from HTML at all: they are referenced from your web app manifest (site.webmanifest) under the icons array, which is what Chrome on Android and PWA installs read. One quiet insurance policy: even with no HTML at all, browsers request /favicon.ico from the site root by convention, which is why that file belongs at the root even if you link everything else explicitly.
The browser tab is a UI element, not decoration
People routinely keep twenty or more tabs open, and past about ten, browsers shrink tabs until the favicon is the only thing left identifying each one. A site without a favicon becomes a grey globe in that lineup — functionally invisible, and easy to close by accident. The favicon is also what search engines display beside mobile results, what bookmark managers index by, and part of what password managers use to visually match saved logins. Checking the 16px preview is two minutes of work that pays off every time someone tries to find their way back to your site.
File sizes, formats, and follow-on steps
Favicons are requested on effectively every page load, so bytes matter more per pixel than anywhere else on a site. The PNGs here come out of the same encoder that powers the PNG compressor, so they arrive already optimised — a 32px icon is typically one or two kilobytes. The 512px manifest icon is the only file where size is worth watching; if your artwork is photographic it can reach a few hundred kilobytes, and running it through the compressor is worthwhile. If you only need the .ico file and want control over which resolutions it embeds — including the 256px entry used by Windows tiles — the single-purpose PNG to ICO converter does exactly that and nothing else.