Convert HEIC to PNG

Most people converting an iPhone image want JPG, and if you arrived here without a specific reason, that is probably the page you want instead. PNG is the deliberate choice, and it is worth being clear about when it is the correct one, because the file you get will be several times larger and for a photograph you will see no benefit at all.

Every save as JPG discards a little more detail, so an image that will be cropped, colour-corrected and saved several times accumulates damage with each pass. PNG does not: once the picture is decoded, it is stored exactly, and it stays exactly that through however many rounds of editing. If the image is going into a design tool and coming out again, start with PNG.

Not everything an iPhone saves as HEIC is a photograph. Screenshots, images with text in them, diagrams, anything with hard edges between flat areas of colour — these are what PNG was built for, and what JPG handles worst.

JPG compression smears the boundary between a letter and its background, which is visible on a screenshot at a glance and impossible to remove afterwards. For those, PNG is not a preference, it is the right answer.

The PNG stores exactly what the decoder produced, with nothing lost from that point on. But your phone already compressed the picture when it saved the HEIC, and no conversion can undo that. This preserves what you have; it does not recover what the sensor originally saw.

If you want the full data, iPhones can shoot in ProRAW, and that is a decision made before the photograph rather than after.

Expect five to ten times the size of the HEIC, sometimes more. That is not inefficiency in the converter — it is PNG being a poor fit for continuous tone. HEIC is roughly twice as efficient as JPG, and PNG for a photograph is several times worse than JPG, so the two effects compound. A 2 MB photo becoming a 15 MB PNG is entirely normal.

As with every image conversion here, this runs on your own machine. The decoder is downloaded to your browser and the photograph never moves. The metadata does not survive, so location and camera details are gone from the result; for anything you are about to send to somebody, that is a feature.

PNG is the right target when the photograph is going into an editor, a design tool or anything that will save it again. It is the wrong one when the picture is simply being sent to somebody: the file is several times larger than the equivalent JPG and nothing on the receiving end benefits from the difference.

The rule of thumb that survives contact with reality: PNG if it will be edited, JPG if it will be looked at. Both open everywhere, which is the whole reason for converting away from HEIC in the first place.

HEIC decoding runs in your browser through a library the page loads, so a camera roll never leaves the device. That matters more here than on most pairs: photographs carry the place and time they were taken, and uploading them to have their format changed hands that over as a side effect nobody asked for.

If you want the location gone as well as the format changed, that is a separate deliberate step and a separate page — which is the right way round. A converter that quietly stripped metadata would be making a decision that is not its to make.