Turn iPhone HEIC photos into PNG files with no further quality loss. Free, private, nothing uploaded.
Apple switched the iPhone camera to HEIC in 2017, with iOS 11. The format stores a photograph at roughly half the size of an equivalent JPG at the same visual quality, which is why Apple adopted it — it doubles how many pictures fit on a phone without anyone noticing a difference.
The trouble is that Apple adopted it and most of the rest of the computing world did not. HEIC relies on the HEVC video codec, which is covered by a thicket of patents, and the licensing made other companies reluctant to build it in. Windows still asks you to buy a codec from the Microsoft Store to open one. Most websites reject it. Plenty of printing shops cannot read it at all.
So you end up with a photo your phone displays perfectly and nothing else will touch — usually discovered at the worst moment, when a form has just refused your upload.
PNG is lossless, which means it reconstructs every pixel exactly as it was given them. That is worth having in three situations: when the image will be edited and re-saved several times, because each lossy save compounds the damage; when it contains text, line art or a screenshot, where JPG leaves visible smearing around sharp edges; and when a system specifically demands PNG, as some design tools and document systems do.
For an ordinary photograph headed for an upload form or a print shop, JPG is almost always the better answer. A PNG of a 12-megapixel photo can easily run to 20MB or more, which many forms will reject on size alone.
One caveat worth knowing: converting a HEIC to PNG does not recover quality the HEIC already discarded. PNG preserves faithfully, it does not restore. The benefit is that no further loss is added from this point on.
You can drop in as many files as you like and convert them in one pass. Because everything runs locally, there is no upload queue and no per-file wait — a folder of fifty photos finishes in roughly the time a server-based tool would still be uploading the first few.
The first file in a batch takes a few seconds longer than the rest. That is the decoder being fetched; once it is in memory the remaining files are quick.
Large photos take longer than small ones, and a modern iPhone shoots 12 to 48 megapixels, so give a big batch a moment. The page stays responsive while it works, and you can rename each output before you save it.
This matters more for HEIC than for most formats, because HEIC files are overwhelmingly personal photographs straight off someone’s phone. They are pictures of family, of documents, of identity papers. Most online HEIC converters work by sending that file to a server, converting it there and sending it back, which means your photograph sits on a stranger’s computer and you are trusting a deletion policy you have never read.
This page does the work inside your own browser instead. When your browser cannot decode HEIC on its own — Chrome and Firefox cannot, Safari can, because macOS and iOS decode it at the system level — the page downloads a decoder and runs it locally, on your machine. Your photo is read from your disk, decoded in memory and handed back as a download. It is never transmitted anywhere.
A practical consequence: once this page has loaded, it keeps working with your internet disconnected. That is a reasonable way to satisfy yourself that nothing is being sent.
JPG for photographs you are going to share, upload or print — the files are far smaller. PNG when the image will be edited again, or when it contains text, screenshots or sharp graphics that JPG would smudge.
Yes. The PNG encode adds no further loss. The HEIC you started from was already lossy, so PNG preserves exactly what the HEIC held, no more and no less.
PNG stores every pixel without discarding anything, so a photograph can come out five to ten times the size of the HEIC. That is normal. If size matters, use JPG instead.
No. Decoding and conversion both happen inside your browser. Your photos never leave your device.