Convert HEIC to PNG

How to use it#

1. Drop your HEIC or HEIF photos into the box above. Several at once is fine.
2. Wait a moment for the first one. The decoder is downloaded once, then reused.
3. Download each PNG, or take them all at once.

PNG or JPG: which one you want#

Both open anywhere, so the choice comes down to what happens to the picture next. PNG is lossless: the pixels the decoder produced are the pixels in the file. That suits a screenshot, a photo you are about to edit and save again, or anything headed for a design tool, where every save as JPEG would take a little more away.

The cost is size. A 2 MB HEIC photo commonly becomes a PNG of 10 MB or more, because PNG compresses photographs poorly. If the photo is going into an email, an upload form, or a web page, the HEIC to JPG converter gives a file a fraction of that size which looks the same on screen.

Why the first photo takes a few seconds#

Most browsers cannot read HEIC on their own. The format uses HEVC compression, which is covered by patents, and of the major browsers only Safari includes a decoder for it. So that the page works in all of them, it brings its own: about a megabyte of WebAssembly, downloaded the first time you drop a HEIC in and kept in memory for the rest of the batch.

A file that turns out to be a JPEG or PNG with a .heic name, which happens when a phone or a backup service renames things, is spotted from its first bytes and converted by the browser directly, without waiting for the decoder.

What does not come across#

The PNG is written from the decoded pixels, so the metadata in the original stays behind: the date the photo was taken, the location, and the camera settings. Keep the HEIC if you need any of those. The decoder turns the photo the right way up before the PNG is written, so a portrait photo stays upright in any app.

A HEIC can also hold more than one picture, such as the frames of a Live Photo, a depth map, or a burst. Only the main picture is converted, which is the one you see when you open the file.