HEIC to PNG Converter

Most people who convert iPhone photos want JPG, because it is small and opens everywhere. PNG serves a different group: anyone who plans to keep working on the picture. Designers dropping a product photo into a layout, students building a poster, and anyone retouching a portrait in an editor that cannot read HEIC all benefit from a format that does not compress again on every save.

JPG is lossy, so each time you open, change and save it, the encoder throws away a little more detail. After a few rounds you can see soft edges and blocky skies. PNG stores the pixels exactly, so the tenth save looks like the first. Converting once from HEIC to PNG at the start of a project avoids that slow decline.

PNG is also the format that page-layout tools, slide software and web editors handle most predictably for images with sharp edges or text added on top. If you plan to add captions, arrows or a logo to a photo, start from PNG and export a JPG only at the end.

Both formats can store transparency and a color profile, and both keep the full resolution of the photo. The difference is the kind of compression. HEIC, defined in ISO/IEC 23008-12, uses the HEVC codec and discards detail to save space. PNG, specified by the W3C, packs the data without removing anything, much like a ZIP file does for documents.

That is why the file sizes change so much. A photo full of grass, hair or sensor noise is hard to pack losslessly, so the PNG can easily be several times the size of the HEIC. Screenshots, drawings and images with large flat areas compress far better. The line above shows how many files and how much data fit in one batch and in one Gmail message.

The pixels and the embedded color profile come through unchanged, so colors look the same in an editor that manages color. Orientation is applied, so portrait photos open upright. Location and camera details are removed by default; untick Strip metadata under Advanced settings if you want them in the PNG.

A HEIC file can hold more than one image, such as a burst or the frames of a Live Photo. The converter writes the main still image, which is the one Photos shows, as a single PNG. HDR brightness information that some newer iPhones store alongside the photo is not part of a standard PNG, so the result shows the regular version of the picture.

If a project needs smaller dimensions, set a width or longest side under Resize output before converting. Halving the width cuts the pixel count to a quarter, which brings PNG files down sharply without any compression loss. For exact pixel sizes after conversion, the Resize Image tool offers more options.

Each batch takes 20 photos of up to 95 MB each, and all of them get the same settings. Because PNG output is large, it helps to sort the pictures first: convert the ones you will really edit to PNG, and send the rest through HEIC to JPG for viewing and sharing.

Uploaded HEIC files are removed once they are processed, and the PNG files are deleted 30 minutes after conversion, so download them before you close the tab. No account is needed and nothing is kept for later. If a layout program asks for a PDF instead of separate images, Image to PDF combines the PNGs into one document.