Convert HEIC to PNG With Full Quality
Convert HEIC to PNG in your browser. A HEIC file is a container that can hold several images, so this page tells you which one it took and rotates the pixels rather than trusting a metadata flag.
Your photos never leave your device
Nothing to delete later
Live Photo audio stays private
Works in every modern browser
How it works
- 1
Add your HEIC files
Drop them onto the page or click to browse — straight from an iPhone export or a folder.
- 2
Convert
Each container is read, the primary image decoded, and any rotation applied to the pixels.
- 3
Download
Save the PNG files individually or all at once as a zip.
Why use this tool
The primary image is picked correctly
A HEIC can hold thumbnails, depth maps and burst frames, so the item marked primary is the one converted.
Rotation baked into the pixels
HEIC records orientation as a transform and PNG has no such field, so the image is physically rotated instead.
Opens on Windows without a codec
The usual reason for converting: Windows needs a paid HEVC extension before it will show a HEIC at all.
Nothing re-compressed
PNG adds no second lossy pass, so what the camera encoded is what you keep from here on.
Live Photo audio left behind
A Live Photo carries a short video and its recorded sound, and none of that follows the picture into a PNG.
Nothing is uploaded
These are camera originals from someone’s phone, and they are decoded on your device and sent nowhere.
A HEIC file is a container, and “the photo” is a choice inside it
This is the fact that explains almost every strange result people get from HEIC converters. A .heic file is not an image in the way a JPEG is; it is a HEIF container built on the same ISO base media format that MP4 uses, and it holds a numbered collection of items. One item is flagged as the primary image. Alongside it there may be a thumbnail, one or more auxiliary images, a depth map, an alpha mask, the individual frames of a burst, or the video track and audio of a Live Photo. Converting to PNG therefore requires a decision that no JPEG conversion ever needs: which item do you actually mean? A naive decoder that grabs the first image in the file can hand you a 320-pixel thumbnail instead of a twelve-megapixel photograph, which is exactly why some converters produce inexplicably tiny output. This one reads the container properly and takes the item the file itself marks as primary, so what you get is the picture the camera considers the photograph.
Portrait mode lives in a second image, and it does not come with you
Here is where the container model produces a genuinely surprising result. When an iPhone takes a portrait photo, the background blur you see is not necessarily baked into the pixels. The camera stores a normal image plus a depth map as an auxiliary item, and the phone renders the blur at display time from the two together — which is why you can change the aperture in Photos afterwards, an edit that would be impossible if the blur were permanent. Convert that HEIC to a flat PNG and the depth map has nowhere to go, because PNG has no concept of auxiliary images. Depending on what the camera marked primary, you may get the rendered look or the unblurred original, and you can no longer adjust it either way. The same applies to any other auxiliary data the file carried. If the portrait effect matters, render and export it from Photos first, then convert the result.
Orientation is a property, not pixel order — and PNG has no field for it
This is the single most common HEIC bug, and it is worth explaining because it is not a bug in your file. Phones do not rotate image data when you turn the handset; the sensor reads out the same way every time and the file records a transform saying how the picture should be presented. HEIC does this with rotation and mirroring properties stored in the container, and JPEG does something similar with an EXIF orientation tag. PNG has neither. There is no orientation field in the PNG specification at all, so a converter has exactly two options: physically rotate the pixel data as it writes the file, or ignore the property and produce an image that is ninety degrees wrong. A great many tools take the second path without meaning to, which is why a batch of holiday photos comes out with half of them on their side. Everything here is rotated in the pixels, so what you see is what the phone would have shown you.
Why Windows refuses to open the file in the first place
It is worth knowing why this conversion is necessary so often, because the reason is legal rather than technical. The images inside a HEIC are encoded with HEVC, also called H.265, which is covered by a large and fragmented pool of patents held by several licensing groups. Apple ships the decoder with its own devices, and Android has largely followed, but Microsoft chose not to bundle it: on a stock Windows install, double-clicking a HEIC gets you a prompt to buy a codec extension from the Microsoft Store. That single decision is why a photograph taken on a phone cannot be opened on a laptop in the same household, and why so many upload forms, older editors and business systems reject the format outright. Converting to PNG sidesteps the whole question, because PNG has been royalty-free and universally decodable since the nineteen-nineties — it was designed that way deliberately, in response to a patent dispute over GIF.
When PNG is the right target for a HEIC, and when JPEG is
Being honest about this matters, because for the most common case PNG is not the better answer. A HEIC is almost always a photograph, and photographs are what JPEG was designed for: converting a twelve-megapixel HEIC to PNG produces a file of perhaps twenty or thirty megabytes where a good JPEG would be two, with no visible difference. If you are emailing the picture, uploading it to a form, or sending it to someone, JPEG is the sensible destination. PNG earns its place when you need a lossless intermediate to edit — retouching, compositing, or anything that will be saved repeatedly — because each JPEG save would compound the loss. It also earns its place for screenshots taken on an iPhone, which are HEIC files full of sharp text and flat colour, exactly the content JPEG handles worst. Match the destination to the content rather than to the source format.
Camera originals carry more than the picture, and this runs on your machine
A HEIC is different from most images you handle in one respect: it is nearly always an original straight off a camera, not something saved from a website. That means the metadata is complete rather than stripped. It records the exact time, the device model and often its serial-linked identifiers, the lens used, and in most default configurations the GPS coordinates of where you stood, accurate to a few metres. If the file is a Live Photo it also contains around a second and a half of video recorded before you pressed the shutter, with the audio that was in the room at the time — sound you never chose to record and probably never listened back to. Uploading that to a hosted converter hands all of it to a third party. Here the container is parsed and the image decoded entirely in the page, with no request made at any point, which the network panel of your browser will show you while a batch runs.
Common mistakes to avoid
- Assuming the file holds one image. A HEIC is a container that may also carry thumbnails, depth maps, burst frames and a Live Photo video — a naive decoder can hand you the thumbnail.
- Expecting portrait blur to survive. The blur is often rendered at display time from a separate depth map, which has nowhere to go in a flat PNG — render it in Photos first.
- Ignoring orientation. HEIC stores rotation as a property and PNG has no such field, so a converter that does not rotate the pixels gives you half a holiday album on its side.
- Choosing PNG for ordinary photographs. A twelve-megapixel photo becomes twenty or thirty megabytes with no visible gain — JPEG is the right destination unless you need to edit losslessly.
- Forgetting what a camera original carries. Complete EXIF, device identifiers, GPS to within metres, and for a Live Photo the audio recorded before you pressed the shutter.
How it compares
| Feature | This tool | Typical online converters |
|---|---|---|
| Images uploaded to a server | Never — converted in your browser | Usually uploaded |
| Picks the primary image, not a thumbnail | Yes | Varies |
| Rotation applied to the pixels | Always | Often missed |
| Needs a Windows codec extension | No | No |
| Image-count limit | Unlimited | Often capped on free tier |
| Price | Free | Free / paid tiers |
Features
Container-aware decoding
The file is read as the multi-item container it is, not as though it held exactly one picture.
Orientation applied physically
The rotation and mirroring properties are resolved into the output so nothing arrives sideways.
Lossless PNG output
No quality slider, because none applies — the decoded picture is written without a second lossy pass.
Batch conversion
Add a whole camera roll export and convert it in one pass, without an upload queue.
Dimensions unchanged
Width and height stay exactly as the camera recorded them.
No installation
No codec pack, no app, no plugin — it runs on the web page.
Arabic and RTL friendly
Full interface in eight languages, including right-to-left Arabic.
Secure by default
Served over HTTPS, with no file tracking and no third-party upload.
Who uses it
Windows users with an iPhone
Opening a photo that Windows will not display without a paid codec extension.
Designers and retouchers
Getting a lossless intermediate to edit, without a JPEG save compounding on every pass.
Anyone filling in a form
Producing a file an upload validator will accept when it has never heard of HEIC.
People sharing iPhone screenshots
Converting sharp text and flat colour into the format that keeps edges crisp.
Frequently Asked Questions
Choose PNG when you need lossless quality, transparency, or plan to edit the image. PNG keeps every pixel exact, while JPG uses lossy compression to save space.
HEIC is the high-efficiency format Apple devices save photos in by default since iOS 11. It is smaller than JPG or PNG but is not supported by many non-Apple devices and apps.
No. The conversion runs entirely in your browser — your HEIC photos are never uploaded, stored, or shared.
Yes, usually much larger. HEIC compresses very efficiently while PNG is lossless, so a larger file is the expected trade-off for perfect quality.