Convert HEIC to PNG
Turn iPhone .heic photos into PNG files for editors and PNG-only upload forms — decoded on your own device, never uploaded. Plan on much bigger files.
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The print shop's upload box says PNG only. The designer asked for PNG. The app store listing, the CMS media library, the government portal — same answer. Meanwhile the photo came off an iPhone as .heic, a file the Windows Photos app will not open until two codec extensions are installed and that a PNG-only form will not take. This page turns that .heic into a PNG on your own device, so the photo itself never has to leave it.
PNG is lossless: it stores every pixel exactly, has no quality setting and adds no loss however many times you open and resave it. The price is size. The ceiling is three bytes per pixel, 36 MB for a 12-megapixel shot, and lossless compression only brings a photograph part of the way down from there.
That trade pays off exactly where lossless matters: the shot is about to go through several rounds of editing, you're going to cut its background out, or the destination will accept nothing but .png. The rest of this page covers what the decoder does to the pixels on the way, how to work out the size ceiling before you press Generate, and what to do when a PNG-only uploader also has a megabyte cap.
How it works
PNG is already selected and the quality slider is switched off — there is nothing to tune. The real decision comes after the cards show you the sizes.
Drop in the .heic files
Drop the .heic files onto the page or pick them with the file button; .heif is treated the same, and there's no count limit. On the very first one a toast reads "Loading HEIC support…": that's the decoder, roughly 1 MB, coming down once for the visit. Nothing travels the other way.
Leave PNG selected
The quality slider is switched off and shows lossless in place of a number, and the hint beneath it warns that photos may get larger; there's no quality to set. Leave Max width (px) empty and the PNG keeps the pixel dimensions of the photo, up to 10,000 px on the long side; type a width and it comes out smaller.
Generate, read the sizes, download
Press Generate images. Every card lists original size → PNG size, the dimensions and an EXIF stripped tag; a PNG far heavier than the .heic is the normal outcome, not a fault. Names are kept with the extension swapped to .png. Grab cards individually, or hit Download all for the whole run in one .zip.
Why the PNG is so much bigger than the HEIC
The ceiling is easy to predict: megapixels × 3 bytes, one each for red, green and blue. PNG's lossless compression gets under that figure by finding repeated patterns, and a photo full of grain, gradients and texture offers few of them. HEIC does a different job: Apple adopted it because it can hold a picture in as little as half the space a JPEG of equal quality needs.
According to Apple's iPhone User Guide, the main camera shoots at 12, 24 or 48 megapixels depending on the model and the setting. If the destination would take a JPG, HEIC to JPG gives a far smaller file than any row below:
| Photo resolution | Pixels | Raw size at 3 bytes per pixel |
|---|---|---|
| 12 MP | 12 million | 36 MB |
| 24 MP | 24 million | 72 MB |
| 48 MP | 48 million | 144 MB |
Does the PNG lose quality? One step can, and it isn't the PNG
Safari 17 and later is the only browser that displays a .heic by itself, so the page doesn't lean on the browser: every HEIC goes through the same decoder library, fetched on the first file. What that decoder returns isn't raw pixels but a JPEG encoded at quality 95. The page paints that JPEG onto a canvas and reads the PNG back off the canvas.
That quality-95 pass is the only point where the picture can change. It also sets the ceiling: the PNG is exactly as good as that intermediate, never better. What PNG buys is that nothing moves afterward — open it in five editors over a month and the pixels stay put.
A few things stay behind. The PNG comes out without the EXIF block the iPhone wrote, so the where-and-when of the shot stays in the original — the card labels it EXIF stripped. Depth maps, HDR gain maps and Live Photo motion do not come along either; the guide on what HEIC is explains where each of them lives.
When the PNG-only uploader also has a size cap
A form that insists on .png may also cap the file size, and a full-resolution PNG of a phone photo is large. With no quality slider, pixel count is the only lever, and it's a strong one: halve the width and the raw ceiling drops to a quarter. This page can't shrink, but Resize image takes the same .heic, adds a max-width box and offers PNG in its format bar, so the downscale and the conversion happen in one pass and the result is still lossless at its new size. For a 12-megapixel photo in 4:3, which is 4,000 × 3,000 px:
| Max width | Pixels kept | Raw ceiling at 3 bytes per pixel |
|---|---|---|
| 4,000 px (full size) | 100% | 36 MB |
| 2,000 px | 25% | 9 MB |
| 1,200 px | 9% | 3.2 MB |
Batches, 48 MP shots and what Compare shows
No ceiling on file count; memory is the limit, and PNG leans on it hard — a 48-megapixel frame is 48 million pixels held on the canvas, four bytes each, while it is encoded. Sides up to 10,000 px convert at full resolution, and at 4:3 a frame of that size measures about 8,000 px on its long edge, so it passes untouched. On a phone, run those in small groups.
In Compare, the Before half is the copy the decoder extracted from the .heic, because the browser cannot display the original file. A PNG stores those pixels exactly, so expect the two halves to look the same; the size figures on the card tell the rest.
Frequently asked questions
The PNG looks dimmer than the photo did on my iPhone. Did the conversion break something?
No. According to Apple, iPhone photos have carried a gain map since 2020, which the phone's own screen uses to push highlights into HDR. This page converts only the main image, so you get the standard-range rendering without that extra headroom.
I exported a HEIC with a transparent background from a drawing app. Does the PNG keep it?
No — the decoder on this page produces a JPEG as its intermediate, and JPEG has no alpha channel, so that area comes back solid before the PNG stage ever sees it. For a transparent PNG, export .png straight from the app, or run an opaque photo through Remove background afterward.
Can I just rename IMG_1234.heic to IMG_1234.png?
No. Renaming changes the label, not the bytes: the file is still a HEIF container with an HEVC-coded image inside, and software that cannot read HEIC still cannot. Converting rewrites the pixels into an actual PNG.
Is the PNG 8-bit or 16-bit?
8 bits per channel, because that's what the canvas holds, and there's no 16-bit option. The quality-95 intermediate is an 8-bit JPEG anyway, so a deeper PNG would have nothing extra to store.
Will the PNG open on Windows 10 or 11 without the HEIF extension?
Yes. PNG does not depend on those codecs: per MDN, all the major browsers have read it since their first versions, so whichever browser is already on the PC opens it. The codec-extension problem only applies to the .heic you started with.
I converted a Portrait mode shot. Can I still change the blur in the PNG?
No. The depth data sits in the HEIC as a separate auxiliary image, according to Apple, and this page converts only the main image, so the PNG has no depth map to work with. Keep the original .heic if you may want to edit the effect later.
Does this page need an internet connection, and is my photo uploaded to decode it?
The first HEIC needs a connection because a decoder of about 1 MB is downloaded; if it can't load you get a clear message rather than a broken file. The photo is never sent anywhere: decoding, drawing and PNG encoding all happen in your browser's memory.