The photos on your phone are HEIC. The images on your website cannot be. Chrome, Firefox, and Edge will not render a HEIC file inside a web page — and Safari being the lone exception does nothing for your non-Apple visitors — which leaves anyone publishing iPhone photography with a conversion step between the camera roll and the CMS. Shoot a product on your desk, a dish for a food blog, or a listing photo for a rental, and the file that lands on your laptop is one the web simply does not speak. The question is what to convert to, and for the web the strongest answer is usually WebP.
WebP was designed by Google specifically for serving images over the network. At the same visual quality it typically comes in 25–35% smaller than JPEG, it supports transparency the way PNG does, and every modern browser has displayed it natively for years. Smaller images mean faster pages, and faster pages mean better Core Web Vitals scores — which is why performance audits so often flag JPEG and PNG images with a suggestion to serve WebP instead.
This tool converts HEIC to WebP without your photos ever leaving the device. The decoding and encoding run in your browser through WebAssembly, so there is nothing to upload, no queue to wait in, and no server that ever sees your images. It is free, requires no account, and the engine downloads once (about 5 MB) and is cached by your browser, so later sessions start instantly — convert a whole shoot without a single photo leaving your machine.
The quality slider defaults to 80, a sensible balance for web publishing; most photos survive it with no visible difference at normal viewing sizes. One thing worth knowing: HEIC itself compresses about as efficiently as WebP, so do not expect dramatic size savings from the conversion. The gain here is compatibility — turning a file browsers cannot show into one they all can. You can also strip EXIF metadata on the way out, which is worth doing before photos go public.
Why convert HEIC to WebP?
- Chrome, Firefox, and Edge cannot display HEIC; every modern browser displays WebP natively
- Typically 25–35% smaller than a JPEG of comparable visual quality — faster pages and better Core Web Vitals
- Supports transparency, so it covers cases where JPEG would force a flattened background
- A quality slider lets you tune each image for its job, from hero shots to thumbnails
- Optional EXIF stripping removes GPS coordinates before a photo is published
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
WebP 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
- Do my photos leave my device at any point?
- No. The converter runs as WebAssembly inside your browser, so both the HEIC decoding and the WebP encoding happen on your own hardware. There is no upload step, no server processing, and no stored copy anywhere — the only thing ever downloaded is the conversion engine itself, which your browser caches after the first use.
- What quality setting should I use for web images?
- The default of 80 is a good general-purpose choice — photographs look clean at typical display sizes while files stay small. For large hero images where fine texture matters, try 85–90. For thumbnails and previews, you can often drop to 70 or below before anything looks off. Converting the same photo at two settings and comparing takes seconds, so when in doubt, test.
- Will the WebP be smaller than my original HEIC?
- Often not by much, and occasionally it will be slightly larger. HEIC is built on HEVC compression, which is roughly as efficient as WebP for photographs. The reason to convert is not disk space — it is that every browser can render WebP, while HEIC only works in Safari.
- Which browsers support WebP?
- All current ones. Chrome and Edge have supported it for years, Firefox added it in 2019, and Safari has handled it since version 14 in 2020. Unless your audience includes Internet Explorer or very old iOS devices, you can serve WebP without providing a fallback.
- Does the conversion keep EXIF data like location and camera settings?
- You choose. Metadata can be carried through if you want to keep capture details, or stripped in one step before converting. For anything destined for a public website, stripping is the safer default — iPhone photos embed precise GPS coordinates that most publishers would rather not ship to the world.