Convert HEIC to PNG

When HEIC to PNG is the right conversion

There is a specific set of reasons to want PNG, and they are worth checking against before you run anything. A design tool or an editing pipeline that refuses lossy input. A system that accepts PNG and nothing else. A screenshot or a graphic that was saved as HEIC and has flat color or sharp edges, where a lossy re-encode would visibly smear the text. An image with an alpha channel you need to keep.

If none of those describe your file — if it is simply a photograph out of a phone — then JPG is the better answer and the tool says so above the button rather than after the download. Nothing here tries to talk you out of a conversion you have a reason for. It just refuses to pretend the trade does not exist.

An AVIF source needs a different decoder and container check. Use AVIF to PNG for that job rather than renaming the file and hoping a HEIC path accepts unrelated bytes.

HEIC and PNG, in brief

HEIC

Full name	High Efficiency Image Container
Extension	.heic, .heif
Format type	Lossy raster image container (HEIF)
MIME type	image/heic

PNG

Full name	Portable Network Graphics
Extension	.png
Format type	Lossless raster image, with alpha
MIME type	image/png

Lossless is the whole feature, and the whole cost

PNG stores every pixel exactly as it was decoded. HEIC and JPEG both discard detail your eye is unlikely to notice, which is how twelve megapixels fit into two megabytes. Take that away and the same photo lands somewhere between eight and fifteen megabytes, often more.

The estimate appears before the conversion, not after it. It is given as a range rather than a single number, because the real figure depends on how much detail the photograph contains — a flat sky compresses far better than foliage — and a precise-looking guess would be a confident lie. Once the batch is done you get the actual before and after for every file plus a total, so you can see how close the estimate came.

Transparency, and when a HEIC actually has one

PNG carries an alpha channel and this conversion keeps it. In practice that matters less often than people expect: photographs taken with a phone camera have no transparency to preserve, so for a normal camera roll the alpha channel is simply unused bytes. HEIC files exported from editing software can carry one, and those are the files where converting to PNG rather than JPG is unambiguously correct.

When there is no transparency in the source, the receipt says so instead of implying that something was preserved. The same goes the other direction on the JPG side: transparent areas there have to be flattened onto white, which is a real loss and gets stated plainly.

No quality slider, on purpose

Lossless has no quality setting. Every converter that shows you one for PNG is either controlling the compression effort — how long the encoder thinks, not how the image looks — or quietly quantizing the colors down to a palette, which is no longer lossless. Rather than offer a control that does nothing, or one that does something other than what it says, there is no slider here at all.

What you do get is a limit on the longest side. Scaling down is honest: it changes the image in a way you asked for and can see. If the file needs to be smaller and the pixels need to stay, the answer is not PNG — it is HEIC to JPG, which is lossy by design and therefore has the quality control this page cannot honestly offer. That is the same conclusion as the section above, arrived at from the other end: PNG earns its keep on screenshots, diagrams and cut-out edges, and gives a phone photograph nothing back for the megabytes it costs.

Nor is a folder of PNGs always the right shape of answer. When the photographs are going to somebody as one thing rather than as a pile of separate images — an insurance claim, a set of receipts, an inspection report — HEIC to PDF puts them in a single document in a page order you choose, using the same decoder as this page.

The requirement almost always came from somewhere else

Very few people choose PNG for its own sake. A submission portal lists the formats it will take and PNG is on the list. A print shop's drop-off form says PNG or TIFF. A studio's asset folder has a naming convention with a format beside it. A course rejects an assignment because the upload ended in .heic. The format is a rule somebody else wrote, and the file you were given came off a phone that has never heard of the rule.

Rules like that tend to land on equipment chosen by somebody else as well — a shared workstation with a fixed application list, a computer behind a copy-shop counter, a laptop issued for a placement and collected at the end of it. Anyone with an image editor already open solves this in one menu, and should. Where the software list is not yours to extend, a page that decodes and re-encodes on its own is the version of that menu you can actually reach, and it writes every pixel out unchanged, which is the entire point of asking for PNG in the first place.

All of it runs in this tab

Decoding and encoding both happen on your own machine, in a background worker so the page never freezes. In Safari on a Mac or an iPhone the system's own HEIC support does the decoding and nothing is downloaded at all. In Chrome, Firefox and Edge a decoder is fetched once and cached, with the real byte count on the progress bar.

That is worth more here than the convenience. A HEIC out of an iPhone carries the GPS coordinates of where the picture was taken, and a converter that uploads has already received them by the time it strips anything. PNG output on this page carries no EXIF at all, so the location is gone either way — but the file never left the machine to begin with.