HEIC to PNG converter

Why your iPhone photos are HEIC files

Since iOS 11, iPhones and iPads save photos as HEIC by default. It is the High Efficiency Image File Format with the same compression as HEVC video, and it stores a photo in roughly half the space of a JPEG at the same visible quality. On the phone, on a Mac and in iCloud you never notice. The trouble starts when a photo leaves Apple's world: email it to yourself, copy it off with a cable or download it from a cloud drive, and you get a .heic file that Windows Photos, many web forms, older editors and most Android apps cannot open. What is a HEIC file explains the format and the Windows extensions in detail.

How to convert HEIC to PNG

1. Drop the HEIC photos on this page, or choose them. A whole folder of holiday photos at once is fine.
2. Wait for the first one. The first time, your browser fetches the HEIC decoder, about 2 MB, and keeps it. After that each photo takes a second or two.
3. Save. Click Save PNG next to a photo, or Save all for one ZIP. Each PNG keeps the name of the original, so IMG_4021.HEIC becomes IMG_4021.png.

No extensions, no app, no upload

Browsers other than Safari cannot decode HEIC on their own, which is why most HEIC converters upload the photo to a server and convert it there. getPNG does it differently: it runs libheif, the open source HEIC decoder used by many photo apps, compiled to run inside your browser. The photo is decoded in this tab and written as a PNG in this tab, so it never goes anywhere. That matters more for iPhone photos than for most files, because they are pictures of people, homes and children, and they often carry the exact location where they were taken.

It also means you need nothing installed. On Windows, opening HEIC normally takes two Microsoft Store extensions, one of them paid; here Chrome, Edge or Firefox is enough, on Windows, a Mac, a Chromebook or an Android phone.

What changes, and what does not

The photo is kept at full size, and PNG adds no loss of its own, so the PNG holds exactly what the HEIC decodes to. The file gets much bigger: a 12 megapixel iPhone photo of 2 or 3 MB can become a PNG of 15 MB or more, because PNG is lossless and HEIC is not. If you only want to share or upload the photo, the HEIC to JPG converter gives far smaller files; HEIC vs JPG vs PNG goes through which one to keep for what.

• Location and camera details are left behind. GPS coordinates, the date and the camera model are not copied into the PNG.
• Only the still photo is converted. The moving part of a Live Photo, and extra images in a burst, are not in the PNG.
• Colour is converted to standard sRGB. A photo taken in HDR looks like its ordinary version.
• The photo is the right way up, because the rotation stored in the file is applied as it is decoded.

Stop your iPhone making HEIC files

If you convert photos often, it may be easier at the source. On the iPhone, go to Settings > Camera > Formats and choose Most Compatible; new photos are then saved as JPG. Photos already taken stay HEIC. When you share a photo from the Photos app to another app, the iPhone often converts it to JPEG on the way, which is why a photo sent through a messaging app often arrives as a JPG.

Cut the subject out while you are here

A lot of iPhone photos are converted for a profile picture, a product listing or a slide, where the background is the next thing to go. Each converted photo has a Remove background button that opens it in getPNG's background remover in the same tab, still without uploading anything, and the remover also accepts HEIC directly. Removing a background on an iPhone compares that with the Lift Subject feature built into iOS. For other formats, the PNG converter takes any picture your browser can open.