Converter · No upload

HEIC to PNG, losslessly

Drop in iPhone photos and download PNGs that keep every decoded pixel — for editing, for workflows that need an alpha channel, or for anywhere a second round of lossy compression is unacceptable. The conversion runs entirely inside your browser: nothing is uploaded, the network meter below proves it live, and it works with your wifi off. For ordinary sharing, HEIC to JPG is the better choice — PNGs of photographs are enormous.

Statusidle Files OutputPNG Network since file read

How this converter works

When you choose a file, the browser's File API hands this page the bytes in memory — no transfer is involved, because the file is already on your machine. A WebAssembly build of libheif, the same open-source decoder used across the industry, turns the HEIC's HEVC-compressed image into raw pixels inside this tab. Those pixels go onto a canvas and the canvas re-encodes them as a PNG. There is no quality setting because PNG has none to offer: it compresses losslessly, so the file that comes back holds precisely the pixels the decoder produced. Unlike the JPG converters on this site, nothing is flattened onto a white background first — PNG keeps an alpha channel, so any transparency in the source survives.

Upload-based converters answer this question with a retention policy: deleted after an hour, deleted after processing, deleted within thirty days. Even when such a promise is kept it describes an intention, and intentions get revised in a version of the terms nobody reads. An architecture cannot be revised by an announcement. Here your bytes only ever sit in memory on hardware you own, which is a stronger guarantee than any deletion schedule. If you have converted a HEIC on this site before, even into a different format, the decoder is already cached from that visit and nothing new has to arrive before this page runs. The methodology page shows how to confirm all of it yourself.

The honest limits, and the big one first: PNG is the wrong format for most photographs. Lossless compression on continuous-tone camera data routinely produces files ten to twenty times the size of the HEIC, which is why HEIC to JPG is the right tool unless you specifically need lossless pixels or an alpha channel. Beyond size: decoding happens in RAM at roughly four bytes per pixel, so a 48-megapixel photo needs about 200 MB while converting and large batches are better run a few files at a time on a phone. Ten-bit and HDR captures are tone-mapped down to standard 8-bit color. Re-encoding strips all metadata, including GPS location — welcome for anything you're about to share, but note the capture date first if you need it. Orientation is applied during decode, so photos come out upright, and a HEIC container holding several images (burst shots, some Live Photo exports) yields a numbered PNG for each rather than silently dropping the extras.

Frequently asked questions

Is my photo uploaded anywhere?
No. The file is opened with your browser's File API, decoded to pixels by a WASM decoder running inside this tab, re-encoded to PNG on a canvas, and handed back as a download link — all in memory, on your device. The readout's network meter shows live that zero requests leave the page once your file is read, and the methodology page shows two independent ways to verify it.
Is the PNG really lossless?
The PNG stores exactly the pixels the decoder produced, with nothing thrown away — which is why this page has no quality dial to set. What it cannot do is undo compression that already happened: HEIC is itself a lossy format, so what's being preserved is HEIC's version of the scene, not the sensor's. Lossless from here forward, not retroactively.
Why is the PNG so much bigger than the HEIC?
Because HEIC is one of the most efficient lossy formats in use and PNG discards nothing. A 2 MB iPhone photo commonly lands somewhere between 15 and 40 MB as a PNG — a tenfold increase is normal, not a fault. If all you need is a photo that other software will open, the HEIC to JPG converter gives you a far smaller file at a quality difference you will not see.
Does the PNG have transparency?
The format supports it, and any alpha channel present in the HEIC is carried straight through — but an ordinary camera capture is fully opaque, so there is usually nothing to carry. What PNG buys you is a container that can hold transparency once you cut something out in an editor, which is the usual reason to prefer it over JPG.
Why is the first conversion slower than the rest?
The decoder is. Browsers cannot read HEIC on their own, so this page loads a 1.4 MB WebAssembly build of the open-source libheif library — once, before your file is ever read. It is cached afterwards, so later conversions start immediately and the whole tool keeps working with the network switched off.

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