Convert HEIC to PNG

• Stores the decoded frame losslessly, at the full width and height the camera recorded.
• Keeps an alpha channel where the HEIF container actually carries one, which a camera photo does not.
• Leaves you with a much heavier file, commonly many times the weight of the .heic that went in.

• There is no quality dial to set, because a lossless encoder has nothing for one to change.
• The frame is not resampled or trimmed on the way through, so the pixel count is unchanged.
• One photo goes through per run; this converter has no batch mode.

1. Pick the .heic out of your camera roll. Drag it onto the panel above, or press Browse photos and find it. Nothing renders a HEIC thumbnail, so what appears is the name, the type and the weight of the file rather than a picture of it.
2. Run the conversion to PNG. No slider needs setting, because a lossless format has nothing to set. Your device turns the HEIF picture back into pixels and writes those pixels out as they are, which is heavier work than the JPG route and noticeably slower on an older handset.
3. Download the PNG and look at the weight. Both sizes are printed side by side in the panel. A large jump is the normal outcome here, so check the figure fits wherever the file has to go before you rely on it.

For an ordinary snapshot it usually is not, and it is worth being clear about the situations that genuinely call for one before you pay for it in megabytes.

• Something downstream lists PNG and refuses the rest. A design tool, an asset pipeline or a form built by someone who decided years ago what it would accept. No argument about formats gets around that decision.
• Editing starts now. Decode once, treat the PNG as the working copy, and export whatever the finished picture needs at the end, instead of laying one lossy generation over another every time you save.
• The picture is not a photograph. Screenshots, scanned pages, receipts and flat graphics land in the camera roll as HEIF too, and large areas of one colour are exactly what lossless compression handles well.
• The file has a see-through area to protect. Rare from a camera, but a HEIF container can carry alpha, and PNG is the output here that keeps it.

The decoder hands the picture over as raw pixels and the encoder stores them as it found them. No quality figure is chosen and none is applied, so what reaches your downloads folder is the HEIF image pixel for pixel, at the width and height the camera recorded.

Nothing is scaled, trimmed or turned along the way. The rotation a phone stores as a property of the file rather than as pixels is applied by the HEIF decoder itself, which is why a photo shot sideways arrives the right way up with the same pixel count it always had.

Transparency comes through where it exists. Almost nothing shot with the camera has a see-through pixel anywhere in it, so for a normal photograph this changes precisely nothing — it matters for the occasional graphic that was saved into a HEIF container with an alpha channel attached.

A 12-megapixel frame is twelve million pixels and a lossless file has to account for every one of them. Real photographs are full of fine gradation and sensor grain, which is close to random and therefore barely shrinks at all, so the result commonly lands at many times the weight of the HEIC that went in and well above the JPG version of the same picture.

Writing it takes a while as well. Encoding a full-size lossless image is real work for the processor in a phone, and several seconds of an apparently idle tab is the normal experience on an older handset. The tab has not stalled; it is compressing.

Where there is a ceiling on file size at the other end, a lossless format is the wrong answer and no control on this page changes that. Take the JPG instead, or turn the PNG into a JPEG with the PNG to JPG converter and bring that under the ceiling in the compressor. A PNG itself has no quality to turn down, so the only moves the compressor has on one are a WebP rewrite or fewer pixels.

HEIF is a container and a phone puts several things inside it. The still frame is what gets converted, while the short clip behind a Live Photo, the depth map Portrait mode recorded and the other frames of a burst are not part of that picture and do not come across.

The metadata does not travel either. A PNG built out of decoded pixels alone has nowhere to put the day the shutter fired, the lens it fired through or the coordinates it fired at, so all of that is missing from the file you download. Keep the original if any of it matters to you; hand over the PNG on its own if you would rather the location did not travel with the picture.

Ask for PNG when something has named it, or when this file is the copy you are about to work on. For everything else — sending a picture to somebody, attaching it to an application, taking it to be printed — HEIC to JPG is the better answer, because it is a fraction of the weight and there is nowhere it will not open.

No browser can display HEIF, so the panel cannot show you the photograph before it converts. It names the file, its type and its weight instead, and the first image you actually see is the PNG that comes back — which is also the moment you find out whether the right file went in.

The panel takes a single file per run, with a 20 MB ceiling no iPhone still photo comes close to, and this converter has no batch mode: the one page that takes several HEIC files at once is JPG to PDF, which makes a document, not pictures. A folder has to be fed through in turn, and since these are the slowest conversions here, a holiday worth of them is a poor fit for this page. Where PNG is not a hard requirement the JPG route is quicker, and the HEIC page has the camera setting that stops the phone writing HEIF in the first place.

• One .heic or .heif photo per run, up to 20 MB, and no batch mode — the bulk resizer takes JPEG, PNG and WebP only.
• How big a photo goes through is a question about your device rather than a policy: a full-size decode followed by a lossless encode needs room for several copies of the picture at once, and a phone that is short of free memory is told the job will not fit before anything is allocated.
• PNG output is the slowest job on the site, and a low-powered phone will take several seconds over a full-resolution frame.