HEIC to PNG Converter

This tool converts HEIC photos — the format iPhones save by default — to PNG inside your browser. It is for anyone who has iPhone pictures that Windows, a website, an upload form or an image editor will not open, and who needs a lossless result rather than another round of lossy compression.

HEIC is a HEIF file (High Efficiency Image File Format, the ISO/IEC 23008-12 standard from MPEG) whose images are compressed with HEVC, the H.265 video codec. Apple introduced it with iOS 11 and macOS High Sierra; iPhones capture in it unless Settings → Camera → Formats is set to Most Compatible. WebKit's engineers put a HEIC photo at about half the space of an equivalent-quality JPEG — the reason Apple uses it, and the reason so much else still cannot read it: Chrome, Edge and Firefox cannot open HEIC images (some can play HEVC video, but that does not extend to HEIC photos).

When you click Convert, each file's header is read first. HEIF files start with an ftyp box listing "brands"; the tool checks them, so a JPG renamed .heic is caught, and an AVIF (the same container, a different codec) is named as AVIF. Then the photo is decoded with a bundled copy of libheif, the open-source HEIF decoder compiled to JavaScript. It is about 1.3 MB, fetched from this site the first time you convert a HEIC (in any browser) rather than when the page opens, and it decodes every image in the file. If libheif cannot read a particular file, the browser's own decoder is tried as a fallback — only Safari 17 and later have one, and it returns just the main image. The decoded pixels are drawn onto a canvas and encoded as PNG, which is lossless: every pixel the decoder produced is kept exactly.

The honest trade-off: a PNG is usually much larger than a JPG of the same photo — often several times the size of the original HEIC. PNG earns its size when the picture must not lose detail — logos, screenshots, text, anything headed for further editing, or a HEIC that carries transparency, which PNG keeps and JPG cannot. For sharing, emailing or uploading photos, HEIC to JPG gives a far smaller file that every device accepts. If size matters more than perfect fidelity, use that.

Be clear about what is not carried over. EXIF metadata — the date taken, GPS location and camera details — is not copied into the PNG, so a photo library may sort converted files by the conversion date; that is also a privacy upside when you share them. Colour profiles are not carried over either: the canvas writes ordinary 8-bit sRGB, so a wide-gamut (Display P3) photo may look slightly less saturated than the original. A Live Photo's motion lives in a separate video file, so only the still photo is converted. If one HEIC file holds several images, each is exported as its own PNG (except in the rare Safari fallback case above, which gives only the main image).

Nothing is uploaded. Files are read into your browser's memory and converted there; you can confirm in your browser's developer tools (Network tab) that no request carries your photos. Up to 50 files per batch, each up to 40 MB.

1. Each file must be at most 40 MB (decoding happens in the tab's memory). Its ftyp box is read: the major and compatible brands must identify HEIC (heic, heix, hevc, mif1 and related brands); JPG, PNG, AVIF and other formats are refused with a message naming what the file really is. 2. libheif (via the heic2any library, ~1.3 MB) is loaded on first use and decodes every top-level image in the file. If it cannot read the file, the browser's own decoder is tried as a fallback — only Safari 17+ has one, and it returns the main image only. 3. Each decoded image is drawn onto a canvas at its full size, with no background colour, so any transparency the HEIC carries is kept. 4. The canvas is encoded with canvas.toBlob("image/png"), which is lossless — there is no quality setting, because PNG has none. 5. The output keeps the original name with a .png extension; a file holding several images produces name-image-1.png, name-image-2.png and so on, and any remaining duplicate names in a batch get a (2), (3) suffix. Download each, or all as a ZIP.