HEIC to PNG Converter - Convert iPhone Photos to Lossless PNG

By the team at VidHaul

HEIC to PNG is the choice when you want to do more with an iPhone photo than just send it. HEIC is the High Efficiency format iPhones use by default; it keeps files small by throwing away detail that is hard to see. That is fine on the phone, but many editors, slide programs, design apps and Windows PCs can’t open it. This HEIC to PNG converter turns those photos into lossless PNG files in your browser, at full resolution, up to 30 at a time. A PNG copy is a safe working file: you can crop it, write on it, paste it into a poster and save it again as often as you like with no extra loss. Below we explain how the converter works, when PNG is better than JPG (and when it is not), why the files are so big, and how to convert HEIC to PNG on Mac, Windows and iPhone.

How does the HEIC to PNG converter work?

Each photo goes through the same steps on your device. The browser opens the HEIC and turns it upright using its stored orientation. Safari decodes HEIC itself; in Chrome, Edge and Firefox the page loads heic2any, a small open-source HEIC reader, the first time you need it. The decoded picture is then drawn at full size onto a canvas and saved as PNG. PNG has no quality setting: every pixel that came out of the HEIC is stored exactly, which is why the Quality slider disappears when PNG is chosen.

Worked example (computed). A standard 12 MP iPhone photo has 4032 × 3024 = 12,192,768 pixels. Stored with no compression at all, with 3 bytes of colour per pixel, that is about 36.6 MB. PNG compresses this without losing anything, but camera photos are full of fine noise and texture, which lossless compression can’t squeeze much. So the PNG usually lands far above the HEIC and often in the tens of megabytes. We have not yet measured a real iPhone HEIC file in our own tests, so we don’t give an exact PNG size here; the size before and after is shown for every photo you convert.

HEIC to JPG or PNG: which should you choose?

People often search for how to convert HEIC to JPG or PNG as if they were the same. They are not. Both open everywhere, but they are built for different jobs. The tool can make all three formats from the same HEIC (PNG, JPG and WebP under More options), so pick by what happens to the image next:

Short version: if the photo is going to be edited or placed into something, convert HEIC to PNG. If it is going straight to a person or a form, HEIC to JPG gives you a much lighter file.

When PNG is the right format for iPhone photos

• Editing in several rounds. Each time a JPG is saved, it is compressed again. After a few rounds of crop, adjust, save, you can see blotches in skies and around edges. A PNG can be saved again and again with no new loss.
• Photos of text. A photo of a whiteboard, a receipt, notes or a screen keeps clean letter edges in PNG, without the faint halos JPG adds around sharp lines. That helps when you print it or zoom in later.
• School and office projects. Slides, posters, reports and design templates often start from a photo. Most of these programs accept PNG even when they refuse HEIC.
• A master copy for later. Keep the PNG as your best version and make small JPGs from it when needed, for example with PNG to JPG or the image compressor.

Why is the PNG so big?

This surprises most people: a HEIC photo of a few megabytes can become a PNG many times that size. The table shows the starting point PNG works from, the raw picture data, for common photo sizes:

Simple pictures with large flat areas (screenshots, drawings, documents on plain paper) compress far better as PNG than busy outdoor photos. If the PNG is too heavy for where you want to use it, you have three easy options:

1. Make it smaller in pixels. A poster on a slide rarely needs 4032 pixels. Use the image resizer with PNG as its output; half the width means about a quarter of the data.
2. Switch to WebP. Under More options, pick WebP. It is lossy but much smaller, and like PNG it keeps transparency.
3. Use JPG if you don’t need lossless. For sharing, JPG at 92% looks the same on screen.

How to change HEIC to PNG on Mac

Use Safari, which decodes HEIC itself and so skips the extra reader. Drag photos from Finder, or drag them out of the Photos app straight into the box. All of them are converted in a row; save them with Download all (ZIP). For a single photo you can also open it in Preview, choose File, Export and pick PNG. For a batch, this page is quicker, and it works the same way on every Mac.

How to convert HEIC to PNG on Windows

Windows often can’t show HEIC files at all without an extra extension, so many people copy iPhone photos to the PC and get stuck. Open this page in Chrome, Edge or Firefox, select the HEIC files in File Explorer and drag them in. The first conversion loads the HEIC reader for a few seconds. When the list is ready, the ZIP gives you PNGs that open in Paint, the Photos app, Word, PowerPoint and every image editor.

How to change HEIC to PNG on iPhone

Open the page in Safari and tap the box, then choose photos from your library or the Files app. Tap Download on each row; the PNGs go to the Downloads folder in Files. Because PNG files of photos are large, check that your phone has free storage before converting a big batch, or convert the photos in smaller groups.

Can I get a transparent background from a HEIC photo?

Not with a format change alone. A normal iPhone photo has no transparent parts, so its PNG has none either; the background is still the room, the sky or the table. PNG only keeps transparency that is already there. This tool does not cut out people or objects. If your HEIC image does have transparent areas, they stay transparent in PNG and WebP, and turn white only if you pick JPG.

How accurate is the HEIC to PNG converter?

Once the HEIC has been decoded, the PNG is an exact copy of those pixels at the same width and height. The honest limits are on the decoding side:

• The PNG can’t be better than the HEIC. Lossless means no new loss. Detail the HEIC already dropped does not come back.
• 8-bit colour, standard colour space. The browser canvas stores 8 bits per colour and works in the standard sRGB colour space. iPhone photos often hold a wider range of colour, so very saturated colours can look a touch less vivid on a wide-colour screen. On most screens you won’t notice.
• Not yet measured on real iPhone files. Our tests so far used JPG, PNG, WebP and AVIF images, not a real iPhone HEIC, so we don’t publish HEIC sizes or timings.
• Large photos on phones. A 48 MP photo needs a few hundred megabytes of memory while it is converted. On an older phone that can be slow or fail; a computer has no problem.
• No metadata. Location, date and camera details are not copied into the PNG.

Why this tool is different

Most HEIC to PNG converters online upload each photo to a server and send back the PNG. With PNG that is slow in both directions, because the result is often many times larger than the HEIC you sent. Here the conversion happens in the page: your browser reads the HEIC from your disk, decodes it (natively in Safari, with the open-source heic2any reader in other browsers), draws it on a canvas and writes the PNG to your disk. Nothing travels over the internet, so even a batch of large PNGs is ready as fast as your device can work, and after loading it works offline.

The second difference is honesty about the trade-off. Every row shows the size before and after, and the output can be switched between PNG, JPG and WebP under More options without adding the files again, so you can see for yourself what lossless costs for your own photos. Copy summary copies those numbers, and Copy link with these settings saves your chosen output in a link.

What we measure

For every file the tool measures the original size in bytes, the decoded width and height, and the size of the PNG it made. Those are the numbers shown in each row. Nothing else is measured or stored.

What we do not do: we don’t resize, sharpen or retouch the photo, we don’t remove backgrounds, we don’t keep the metadata, and we don’t use 16-bit colour. We also don’t collect anything about your photos.

Need the PNGs lighter for a website later? PNG to WebP keeps transparency at a fraction of the size.

Only convert photos you own or have the right to use.

Sources

• W3C: Portable Network Graphics (PNG) Specification, the lossless format with optional transparency.
• Apple Support: Using HEIF or HEVC media on Apple devices.
• heic2any on GitHub, the HEIC reader used outside Safari.
• MDN: HTMLCanvasElement.toBlob(), which writes the PNG.
• MDN: Image file type and format guide.