Convert HEIC to PNG
PNG is the right target for a HEIC in a few specific situations and an expensive mistake in most of the rest. It keeps every pixel exactly as it was decoded, which is worth paying for when something downstream insists on a PNG or the file is about to be edited repeatedly — and worth very little if you simply want to look at your photos on a computer.
Nothing is uploaded. Every image stays in this browser tab —here is how that works.
Work out which situation you are in
Three cases where PNG is the right call for a picture that arrived as a HEIC:
- Something asks for a PNG by name. A submission portal that lists
.png, a design tool’s import filter, an app store’s asset spec, a document template. Here the format is the requirement and quality never enters into it. - The file is going to be edited and saved more than once. Every JPEG save runs the lossy encoder again over the previous save’s output, so a file that goes round a few times visibly degrades. A PNG working copy removes that risk for as long as it stays a PNG.
- There is real transparency in the file. Uncommon from a camera, but a HEIF exported by a graphics app can carry an alpha channel, and JPG has nowhere to put one.
Everything else — sharing them, emailing them, dropping them in a document, uploading them, printing them — is a JPG job. The JPG opens in the same places, arrives at roughly a tenth of the size, and at quality 90 nobody is going to catch you out on a photograph.
What “much larger” comes to in numbers
This page starts inside the tool’s default 1920 × 1080 box, and that one setting does most of the work: a 12-megapixel iPhone photo lands at about 1,440 × 1,080, which is a PNG of a few megabytes rather than a monster.
Switch the resize preset to Original and the arithmetic changes completely. A 12-megapixel photo is 4,032 × 3,024, which is 12.2 million pixels, which is around 49 MB of raw pixel data before compression is applied at all. Lossless compression is not very effective on photographs — sensor noise is close to random, and random data does not compress — so expect the PNG to settle somewhere between a third and two-thirds of that figure. A 48-megapixel photo from a recent Pro phone is four times bigger again, before you have converted a second one.
Both numbers are worth knowing before you reach for Original out of an instinct that bigger must be better.
Convert in batches, not the whole camera roll at once
All of this happens in this tab, which means your browser holds the results until you download them. That is unremarkable for JPGs and much less so for full-resolution PNGs of photographs: a hundred of them is a couple of gigabytes sitting in a browser process, and a phone runs out long before a laptop does.
Twenty to fifty at a time is comfortable. Take the ZIP, hit Clear, carry on. The archive is written out one file at a time rather than assembled in memory, so it never becomes a second copy of everything — but a ZIP still cannot exceed 4 GB, and if a batch would pass that the tool says so up front and asks you to download the images individually instead of failing somewhere in the middle.
What gets downloaded to make this work
Chrome, Firefox and Edge cannot decode HEIC by themselves, so the first time you open one here the page fetches a WebAssembly build of libheif — about a megabyte and a half, once, and cached for the rest of the session. That library is the only thing that crosses the network in either direction. The photographs go nowhere.
On Safari, not even that happens: macOS and iOS already have the system decoder, so the browser does the work itself and the page downloads nothing at all. It is the one case where the iPhone in your hand is the best machine for the job.
What changes when you convert HEIC to PNG
Only the first frame is kept — Trade-off
The source can hold an animation and the output is a single still, so the first frame is converted and the rest are dropped. There is no warning at the point of use — the file simply stops moving — so if the motion mattered, a short muted MP4 or WebM is the format you are looking for, at a fraction of the size an animated GIF would be.
HDR is flattened to standard range — Trade-off
The source can describe highlights brighter than a normal screen shows; the target cannot. The image is tone-mapped down to standard dynamic range, which usually reads as slightly duller highlights and a flatter sky. Nothing is broken — it is the same picture, rendered for an ordinary display.
Wide-gamut colour is converted to sRGB — Trade-off
Phone cameras and scanners record colours outside what sRGB can express — the saturated reds and greens in particular. Those are converted rather than clipped, so the picture stays true, but the most intense colours land slightly inside where they were. The conversion is done properly and once; the alternative, leaving the numbers alone and dropping the profile, is what makes images look washed out.
10 bits per channel become 8 — Trade-off
The source stores finer gradations per colour channel than the output can hold. In practice this shows up in smooth gradients — a clear sky, a studio backdrop — where the extra precision was hiding the steps between shades. At 8 bits those steps can become faintly visible bands.
PNG is lossless from here on — Benefit
Whatever the image looks like going in is exactly what comes out, pixel for pixel, and it will stay that way through any number of further PNG saves. That makes it the right target for a master copy, a screenshot, or anything with text and hard edges — and the wrong one for a photograph you want to be small.
A HEIC can hold more than one image, and only the main one converts — Note
iPhone HEIC files routinely carry more than the photo you see — burst frames, a depth map, a thumbnail. The primary image is the one that converts; the rest are discarded, along with anything Live Photo–related, because a still image format has nowhere to put them.
A lossless target does not undo earlier loss — Note
Converting a lossy image to a lossless format preserves exactly what is in the file now, including every compression artefact it already carries. It does not repair them, and it usually makes the file considerably larger, because lossless compression has to store the artefacts faithfully too. Do this when you need the format, not when you want the quality back.
The quality slider does nothing here — size comes from dimensions — Note
A lossless target has no quality dial to turn, so the slider is disabled and the only lever that moves the file size is how many pixels there are. Halving the width and height quarters the pixel count, which is almost always a bigger saving than any encoder setting would have been. Set a max width you actually need rather than shipping the original dimensions.
Camera and location metadata are not carried over — Note
EXIF is dropped: the camera model, the exposure settings, the timestamp, and — the one that matters — the GPS coordinates of where the photo was taken. That is a privacy improvement for anything you are about to publish and a loss if you were relying on it for cataloguing. Orientation is the exception: it is applied to the pixels, so the image stays the right way up.
Output is sRGB — Note
Everything this tool writes is in sRGB, the colour space the web assumes. That is what makes the result look the same in a browser, a chat app and a photo viewer without an embedded profile to carry around.
Questions people ask about this conversion
Should I convert my HEIC photos to PNG or to JPG?
JPG, unless something specifically requires a PNG or you are about to edit the file several times over. For viewing, sending, printing and putting in documents, a JPG at quality 90 is indistinguishable on a photograph and roughly a tenth of the size.
How large will a PNG of an iPhone photo be?
Inside the default 1920 × 1080 box, a few megabytes. At full resolution, a 12-megapixel photo carries 12.2 million pixels and about 49 MB of raw pixel data, and a PNG of that typically settles between a third and two-thirds of the figure. A 48-megapixel photo from a Pro phone is four times that again.
Can I convert HEIC photos on my iPhone or iPad?
Yes. Safari has the system HEIC decoder, so it converts them without downloading anything extra and without sending them anywhere. The constraint is memory rather than capability — do a few dozen at a time on a phone rather than a whole album.
Does a PNG keep the transparency in a HEIF file?
If there is any, yes, at full precision. Photos taken with the camera do not have an alpha channel, but HEIF files exported by graphics apps sometimes do — and that is one of the few occasions when PNG is unambiguously the right target for one.
Related
Other things you can turn a HEIC into
Try it with your own file
Drop an image in and see the result before you download anything.