PNG is the format you reach for when the pixels have to stay exactly as they are. Designers dropping a photo into Figma, developers committing images to a repository, writers assembling documentation, anyone planning several rounds of edits — they all want a file that will not quietly degrade each time it is saved. If your source material comes from an iPhone, though, it is probably sitting in HEIC, a format most of those tools either refuse to open or handle inconsistently.
Converting to JPEG is the common workaround, but it stacks one lossy compression on top of another, and every subsequent save in a JPEG editor grinds away a little more detail. PNG takes a different deal: the file is larger, but the image data is stored losslessly. Decode the HEIC once, write the pixels to PNG, and from that point forward nothing changes unless you change it. For a working master you intend to crop, annotate, retouch, or run through ten revisions, that stability is exactly what you want.
The conversion here happens entirely on your own machine. The page loads a WebAssembly decoder into your browser, reads the HEIC locally, and writes the PNG locally — no upload, no server-side processing, no account, no charge. If you are converting pictures of internal dashboards or photos of signed paperwork, that distinction is not academic.
One honest note on size: PNG compresses photographs far less efficiently than HEIC does, so expect the output to be several times larger than the original file. That is the cost of lossless storage. If you only want to share a photo or put it on a web page, JPEG or WebP is a better fit — PNG earns its bulk when you need an exact, editable copy. There is no quality setting to think about here, either; PNG has no lossy mode, so every conversion produces the same faithful result.
Why convert HEIC to PNG?
- PNG is lossless — once converted, the image never degrades again no matter how many times you re-save it
- Design tools, documentation systems, and image libraries that choke on HEIC all accept PNG
- If the HEIC carries an alpha channel, the transparency survives in the PNG
- The right choice for a working master you plan to edit, annotate, or revise repeatedly
- No quality decisions to make — the output is a faithful copy every time
How it works
- Step 1
Drop your files
Drag your HEIC files into the converter above, or click “Choose files”. Batches are welcome.
- Step 2
Pick your settings
PNG is preselected. Adjust quality or size if you want, or keep the defaults.
- Step 3
Convert and download
Conversion runs locally in your browser. Download files individually or grab everything as a zip.
Frequently asked questions
- Does this converter send my images to the cloud?
- It does not. Everything — decoding the HEIC, encoding the PNG — runs locally in your browser through WebAssembly. No server ever receives your files, and no signup is required. You can verify this by watching your browser's network activity: beyond the one-time download of the conversion engine itself, your images never appear in any outgoing request.
- Why is my PNG so much larger than the original HEIC?
- HEIC uses aggressive lossy compression borrowed from the HEVC video codec, while PNG stores image data losslessly. For photographic content that difference is dramatic — a PNG can easily be five to ten times the size of the HEIC it came from. The size buys you a file that will never lose detail through re-saving.
- Is HEIC to PNG conversion truly lossless?
- The PNG encoding step is completely lossless — every pixel the decoder produces is stored exactly. Keep in mind the HEIC itself was already lossy-compressed by the camera, so the PNG is a perfect copy of the decoded image, not a recovery of detail the iPhone discarded at capture time. No further loss is introduced from this point on.
- Does transparency carry over from HEIC to PNG?
- Yes. HEIC files can contain an alpha channel, and when one is present it is preserved in the PNG output, which supports full 8-bit transparency. Ordinary iPhone camera photos do not contain transparency, so for those the question never comes up — but exported graphics or edited images with alpha convert cleanly.