1Upload the ICO icons that came out the wrong way round.
2Pick a quarter turn or a half turn, or type an arbitrary angle and choose a colour for the corners it will expose.
3Apply the rotation; the pixels and the orientation flag are reconciled so every viewer agrees on which way is up.
4Download the rotated ICO file.
Rotate ICO FAQ
Does the format decide whether rotation is lossless?
+
It does. ICO is a container that holds several square bitmaps at once (16, 32, 48, 64, 128 and 256 px) so Windows and browsers can pick the size they need. That property is exactly what determines whether a quarter turn is free or costs a re-encode.
Anything specific to ICO I should know?
+
Yes — an ICO is a stack of square bitmaps, not one image, so operations apply to the stack and Windows still picks whichever size it wants. It is the kind of thing that explains why a file looks right in one application and wrong in another.
How does Rotate ICO turn the file?
+
Concretely, each bitmap in the stack is rotated and the entries stay square, which is the only orientation an icon container permits. Quarter turns and half turns are the common case and take the cheapest path available for the format.
Can I rotate by an arbitrary angle, not just 90 degrees?
+
Yes, though the two are different operations underneath. A multiple of 90 degrees rearranges existing data; any other angle has to rebuild the grid and fill the corners, so it costs a resample and usually wants a background colour choosing.
Which sizes should the icon contain?
+
16, 32 and 48 pixels cover Windows Explorer and browser tabs; 256 covers large-icon view and modern shortcuts. Keeping all of them in one file costs almost nothing and stops the operating system from having to guess.
What can I upload to Rotate ICO?
+
ICO files containing one or several sizes, plus ordinary PNG or JPG artwork if you are building an icon rather than editing one. Windows .ico and browser favicon files are the same format.
Is there a file size limit on Rotate ICO?
+
Yes: free accounts process images up to 25 MB each, which no icon file will ever approach — a full 16-to-256-pixel stack is typically well under 200 KB. Icons are the one part of the image family where the cap is genuinely irrelevant.
Will Rotate ICO lower the quality of my ICO icons?
+
The sizes stored inside an ICO are lossless bitmaps, so the pixels themselves do not degrade. What actually decides how good an icon looks is whether the size the operating system asks for exists in the stack — a 256 px entry downscaled on the fly by Windows always looks worse than a real 32 px entry.
Why would a modern-format site run Rotate ICO?
+
WEBP.to is built around the modern replacement for both of the old defaults: one format that does lossy, lossless, alpha and animation, and reliably lands smaller than the JPEG or PNG it came from. People arrive here having decided the old defaults are costing them bandwidth, and that decision immediately raises the rest: what size, what quality, what happens to the transparency. Rotate ICO is on the same upload and the same account so those questions get answered in one place.
Once Rotate ICO has run, what is worth doing next?
+
The converter on this site moves images to and from WebP, PNG, JPG and AVIF, which is where you decide whether a smaller file is worth losing the older browsers. Doing it in that order matters: pick the pixels first and the container afterwards, because the container is the cheap decision and the pixels are the expensive one.
Do the sibling sites run something different?
+
The engines are identical — same libraries, same workers, same caps. What is different is the opinion attached, and the opinion here rests on a property of the format this site is named after: the same .webp extension can hold a lossy VP8 frame, a lossless one, or an animation, so the sensible processing path is decided per file rather than per extension.
What happens to my file, and is an account required?
+
No account, and nothing is retained: uploads are deleted from the workers shortly after the job finishes, and nothing is inspected, listed or indexed. Accounts exist for history and batch size only.
