Convert HEIC to PNG

PNG or JPG? Answer this first

Two pages on this site take iPhone photos out of HEIC, and they serve different needs. HEIC to JPG is the right choice for most photographs: a third of the size, visually identical, opens everywhere. This page — PNG — is for when something downstream demands it: an upload form that only accepts PNG, an editing pipeline where you want a lossless master that survives repeated saves, or a documentation workflow standardised on PNG.

The practical difference is that PNG is lossless. Every edit-and-save cycle of a JPG discards a little more detail; a PNG can be opened and saved forever without degrading. If the photo is about to go through an editor several times, converting to PNG once at the start is the version of the file that survives the journey best.

Why your iPhone photos will not open

Since iOS 11, iPhones save photos as HEIC — genuinely better compression, and almost nothing outside Apple’s ecosystem reads it. Windows wants a codec from the Microsoft Store that stopped being free in several regions, upload forms reject the files, and older editors draw a blank. Converting is the durable answer, because the result opens on machines you do not control.

Expect large files — that is the deal

A twelve-megapixel photo holds a lot of pixels, and PNG stores every one of them exactly. Files several times the size of the original HEIC are normal. If that weight defeats the purpose — an email attachment, a form with a size cap — either convert to JPG instead, or run the PNGs through the resizer first and convert a smaller picture.

What the conversion preserves, exactly

The decode is exact and PNG adds no loss of its own, so the result holds precisely what the HEIC decoded to — including the correct orientation, which is read from the photo’s metadata and baked into the pixels so the image is upright everywhere. What no conversion can do is restore detail the iPhone’s encoder already discarded at the moment the photo was taken.

Live Photos become a single still: the short video attached to them has nowhere to go in a PNG.

How the decoding works, and where your photos go

No browser except Safari reads HEIC natively, so this page carries its own decoder — libheif, compiled to WebAssembly, loaded only when your first HEIC arrives. The decoding then runs entirely on your device: nothing is uploaded, nothing is stored, and no copy of your photos exists anywhere for anyone to keep. For a folder of family pictures or photographed documents, that matters more here than on almost any other tool.

Whole albums at once

Select everything and take the results back as a zip. Each photo is decoded in full while it converts, so a few hundred at a time is more comfortable than a few thousand — the ceiling is your device’s memory, not a server’s patience.