Convert HEIC to PNG
Convert HEIC images to PNG free, in your browser.
Change the format. Drop an image, a PDF or a Word document.
- JPG · PNG · WebP · Text · Word
- Word
- PDF · Text
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PNG is the deliberate answer to a HEIC file rather than the obvious one. Most people converting an iPhone photo want JPG, because JPG is what the upload form will accept and what the person on the other end can open. You pick PNG when the picture is going to be worked on again: cropped, marked up, pasted into a document, re-saved three or four times before anyone sees it.
It works because PNG discards nothing. The HEIC is decoded once, and every pixel that comes out of it is written into the PNG exactly as it was. Edit that PNG later and you are still working from the whole picture rather than from a copy of a copy, which is the thing that quietly ruins a photograph passed around an office.
The cost is size and it is not modest. A 2 MB photo off an iPhone routinely lands between 8 and 15 MB as a PNG, because HEIC was built to store photographs compactly and PNG was built to store screenshots exactly. If the photo is going to an upload form, HEIC to JPG is the file you actually want.
How to convert HEIC to PNG
- Drop your HEIC files onto the box above, or paste them with Ctrl+V.
- Save each file from its tile, or take them all at once.
HEIC and PNG side by side
| HEIC | PNG | |
|---|---|---|
| Where it came from | 2017, when Apple made it the iPhone camera default | 1996, designed as a free replacement for GIF |
| Throws detail away | Yes | No, every pixel is kept |
| Transparency | Yes | Yes |
| Where it opens | Apple devices natively. Windows needs an extension from the Store, and many web forms reject it outright. | Everywhere, without exception, since the late nineties |
| Best at | Storing camera photos on an iPhone, where the space saving is real and everything can read it | Screenshots, logos, diagrams and anything with text or hard edges in it |
More on what a HEIC file is and why your iPhone makes them.
Questions about HEIC to PNG
Why is the PNG so much larger than the HEIC?
Because they are solving opposite problems. HEIC stores a photograph using the same compression a video codec uses, throwing away detail your eye does not miss, and it is very good at it. PNG stores every pixel exactly and compresses only by finding repetition, which photographs have almost none of. Ten times the size is normal for a camera photo. A screenshot or a flat graphic converted the same way will barely grow at all, because that is the kind of image PNG is efficient at.
Does the photo come out the right way up?
Yes. A phone held sideways stores the picture the way the sensor read it plus a tag saying which way up it goes, and a converter that ignores that tag hands back a photo rotated a quarter turn. The rotation is applied here before the PNG is written, so what you see in the tile is what the file contains. The tag itself is not carried over, because a PNG with the pixels already upright does not need one.
What happens to the depth map and the Live Photo?
Both are lost, and there is nowhere for them to go. An iPhone HEIC can carry a depth map for portrait blur and a short video paired with the still, and a PNG is a single flat image with no container for either. If you want to keep the portrait effect, export the photo from Photos with the effect already applied and convert that. The Live Photo has to be saved as a video from the phone; no image format will hold it.
Is the location data still in the PNG?
No. The picture is decoded and redrawn to make the PNG, so the camera, the settings, the timestamp and any GPS coordinates are left behind with the original container. That is a side effect rather than the point, though. If removing the data is the reason you are here, <a href="/remove-metadata">Clean</a> does it without re-encoding anything, and <a href="/what-is-exif-data">what EXIF data is</a> covers what was in there.