Convert HEIC to GIF

Since 2017 an iPhone has recorded HEIC by default, and the codec inside it is HEVC — covered by patent pools whose terms a large part of the industry declined to accept. So support never became universal: Windows asks for a paid codec, several browsers will not display the format, and a great many upload forms, print services and web applications reject it outright.

That is the whole reason this page exists. Nothing is wrong with the photograph, and the destination cannot read it. Which format to convert into is then a choice, and GIF is rarely the best one.

A HEIC carries ten bits per channel, wide colour and high dynamic range — it is the reason a modern iPhone photograph looks right on a modern screen. A GIF carries at most 256 colours in total, chosen for the whole image.

The result is not subtle. Skies band into visible stripes, skin tones go blotchy, and any smooth gradient breaks into steps. Dithering scatters the error so the banding reads as texture instead of stripes, which some people prefer and neither of which is the photograph. No setting avoids this, because the limit is the format rather than the conversion.

It is worth ten seconds. Almost every form that accepts GIF also accepts JPG and PNG, and both are dramatically better here: JPG is a fraction of the size with no banding at all, and PNG keeps every colour losslessly.

GIF is the right answer only when something names it specifically — an old forum, a signature image, a system nobody has updated in a decade. If the list of accepted extensions includes anything else, take the anything else.

A HEIC from an iPhone can be a container holding more than a picture: the still, a short video from around the moment of capture, and on portrait shots a depth map. Converting produces the still and discards the rest.

People frequently come here hoping to turn a Live Photo into a shareable animation, and GIF is the wrong destination for that even when it works. Converting the video part to MP4 keeps every frame, plays everywhere, and is typically a fraction of the size an animated GIF would be — a three-second clip is a couple of hundred kilobytes rather than several megabytes.

HEIC carries wide-gamut colour data with a profile describing it, and a conversion that ignores that profile produces images which look flat and desaturated next to what the phone shows — most visible on skies, foliage and skin. That is the common complaint about converted iPhone photographs, and it is usually the profile rather than the target format.

This conversion does not handle it. The decoder hands back pixels, nothing here reads the embedded profile, and GIF has nowhere to record one even if it did — so a Display P3 photograph is written as though its numbers were sRGB and comes back duller than the original. It is the second reason, after the 256-colour palette, that a phone photograph is the wrong material for this conversion. If the colour matters, open the result next to the original before the GIF becomes the file anyone sees.

An iPhone photograph carries the date, the camera settings and, unless location services were off, the exact place it was taken. GIF has essentially nowhere to put any of it, so the converted file arrives without.

That is a loss for a personal archive — a photo library that will not sort chronologically is a great deal of work to repair — and a benefit for anything being published, since the location is the field people most often forget they are sharing. Either way it is worth knowing which of the two situations you are in before converting a camera roll.

Converting is a lossy step twice over: the HEIC was already compressed, and the GIF throws away nearly all the colour. Doing it once for a specific upload is fine; deleting the originals afterwards is throwing away the photographs.

Keep the HEIC as the master and generate whatever a particular destination needs. The originals also hold the ten-bit data, the Live Photo and the metadata, and no conversion recovers any of them.

The conversion runs inside the browser tab on your own processor, so the photographs are never uploaded. There is no account, no queue and no daily limit, and a whole camera roll can be dropped at once — each file converts in turn and the batch comes back as a single ZIP.

For personal photographs that is the substantive point rather than a feature. The most reliable way to keep a picture private is not to send it anywhere, and it also means a hundred images convert without a hundred uploads.