Convert HEIC to PNG

Convert iPhone HEIC photos to lossless PNG right in your browser. Batch convert many photos at once, free and private, no upload and no watermark.

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Drop your files here (.heic, .heif)

🔒 Private by design: your files are processed locally in your browser and never uploaded to any server.

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Losslessness is the whole reason to choose PNG here

Most people converting an iPhone photo want a JPG, and for sharing or uploading they are right. This page exists for the smaller set of cases where the next thing that happens to the image is not viewing but work: retouching, layering into a design file, running through a batch process, or handing to a system that will re-save it several times before anyone looks at it.

JPEG loses a little on every save. That is not a flaw so much as the deal it offers, and it is invisible once. Six saves later, on a photo that has also been cropped and colour-corrected in between, it is not invisible at all. PNG makes a different offer: store the pixels exactly, take whatever space that needs. Once the HEIC has been decoded, a PNG holds that decode verbatim and every subsequent PNG save holds it verbatim again.

The second reason is duller but at least as common. A great many upload forms, print templates, CMS fields and internal tools simply require a .png file and will not take anything else, and no argument about formats will change their validator’s mind.

Alpha channels, and why a camera HEIC has none

PNG is often chosen for transparency, so it is worth being clear that there is none to preserve here. A photo taken by the iPhone camera app is a fully opaque rectangle; the HEIC container can hold an auxiliary alpha or depth image, but the primary picture that gets decoded has every pixel opaque. The PNG this tool writes is opaque too.

Nothing has been lost in that exchange, because there was never any transparency to lose. If what you actually want is a cut-out with a transparent background, that is a separate operation: convert here, then remove the background with a tool built for it.

Expect a much larger file than the HEIC

Be ready for the size. HEVC, the codec inside a HEIC, is one of the most efficient still-image compressors in wide use, and PNG’s lossless compression cannot compete with it on photographic content, because a photograph contains almost no exactly repeating patterns for a lossless scheme to collapse. The output will typically be several times the size of the input, and on a high-resolution photo it can be dramatically more.

That is the trade you are choosing on purpose. When it turns out to be the wrong trade, HEIC to JPG produces a far smaller file with a quality setting, and the comparison between the two routes is covered in what changes when you convert HEIC to JPG.

Converting a batch of HEIC files to PNG

  1. Drop your HEIC or HEIF files into the box above, or use Choose files. The batch builds up across drops, with duplicates filtered out by name and size.
  2. Click Convert HEIC to PNG. There is nothing to configure: PNG has no quality parameter, so every decoded pixel is written out as it is.
  3. Watch the progress bar, which moves through each photo in turn as libheif decodes it and the browser encodes the PNG.
  4. Download each result. The name is preserved with a .png extension in place of the old one.

When the PNG is a stepping stone

Often this conversion is a middle step rather than a destination, and it helps to plan the whole route. If the PNG is heading somewhere with a size limit, Optimize PNG shrinks it where it can without altering a single pixel, and returns your original bytes when it cannot, and Resize Image will cut the dimensions if the resolution is more than the destination needs. If it is going into a document, PNG to PDF takes it from there.

It is also worth knowing that HEIC is not a format every page here reads. Plenty of the image tools expect an ordinary JPG, PNG or WebP and will refuse a HEIC at the dropzone before any work starts, so a conversion is often the unavoidable first step in a longer pipeline rather than an optional extra. Each tool prints the extensions it takes in its own dropzone line, which is the quickest way to check the route before you commit to it.

Frequently asked questions

There is no quality setting on this page. What decides the output size?

The image itself. PNG compression is lossless, so there is no dial to turn, and the encoder stores exactly the pixels it was given and the file comes out however big that takes. A photo with lots of fine detail and noise produces a much larger PNG than a flat, simple picture of the same dimensions.

Does saving as PNG restore detail that HEVC compression removed?

No, and nothing can. The HEIC was already compressed lossily when your phone wrote it, and whatever was discarded then is gone for good. What PNG guarantees is that no further loss is added on top, since the pixels the decoder produced are the pixels stored in the file, exactly.

Can I re-save this PNG many times without it degrading?

Yes, and that is the main practical reason to pick PNG over JPG here. Every PNG save writes the same pixel values back out, so an image can go through an editor a dozen times without accumulating damage. A JPG re-compresses on each save, and that damage builds up quietly until it becomes visible.

A batch of 48-megapixel photos made my browser struggle. What is happening?

Memory. Each photo is decoded into a raw pixel buffer four bytes per pixel wide and then encoded into a PNG. That raw buffer is dropped as soon as its own photo is finished, but every completed PNG stays in the tab until you download it, so it is the growing pile of PNGs that fills memory. Nothing is capped by us, so the limit is your device. Convert twenty or thirty at a time on a phone rather than several hundred.

Should I run the result through a PNG optimizer afterwards?

It is usually worth trying, and it costs nothing since the optimization is lossless too. A photographic PNG has little redundancy for an optimizer to exploit, so the saving is often small, but the pixels are guaranteed unchanged either way. Screenshots and graphics saved as HEIC benefit far more.

Does the PNG carry the photo's capture date?

No. The conversion runs through raw pixels, so the output has no EXIF block and no capture timestamp, which means a photo library sorting by date taken will fall back to the file's creation date. Keep your originals if that ordering matters to you.

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