Convert HEIC to PNG

Most of the time it is not, and it is worth saying so plainly. If the file is an ordinary photograph you intend to email, upload or print, HEIC to JPG will serve you better and produce a far smaller file.

PNG earns its place in three situations.

The first is screenshots. An iPhone screenshot is full of text and sharp edges, which is exactly what JPG compression handles worst, leaving a faint haze around lettering. PNG keeps it crisp.

The second is anything heading into a design tool. If the image will be edited and re-saved repeatedly, every JPG save discards a little more detail. PNG does not degrade, no matter how many times you save.

The third is when you simply want an exact copy. PNG is lossless, so what you get is precisely what the HEIC held, with nothing thrown away in the conversion.

This is the thing that surprises people. A 2 MB iPhone photo can become a 15 MB PNG, and it will not look any different.

The reason is that HEIC and PNG solve opposite problems. HEIC compresses aggressively to fit more photos on your phone. PNG stores every pixel exactly and compresses only in ways that lose nothing. For a photograph, which is millions of slightly different colors, there is very little for a lossless format to squeeze.

If the size matters more than the last fraction of fidelity, use JPG instead. That is the honest recommendation for most photos.

The PNG is written losslessly, so nothing is discarded at that step. What it cannot do is recover detail the camera already threw away.

Your phone compressed the scene when it wrote the HEIC. This conversion preserves exactly what that HEIC contains, which is not the same as what the sensor originally saw. Lossless means no further loss, not restored quality.

That distinction matters if you are hoping conversion will sharpen a blurry photo. It will not, and no format can.

HEIC is Apple's format, introduced with iOS 11 in 2017. macOS and iOS decode it at the operating system level, so every app on those platforms handles it without thinking.

Windows does not include the codec. Microsoft sells HEIF Image Extensions through the Microsoft Store, which is an awkward thing to ask of someone you have just emailed a photo to. Android support varies by manufacturer and version, and many upload forms reject the format outright.

Converting sidesteps all of it. PNG has been universally readable for decades, and nothing about it depends on who made your computer.

The decoder runs in your browser, reads the file from your device, and writes the PNG there too. No server sees your photo, because no server is involved.

You can verify it in about five seconds. Load this page, disconnect from the internet, then convert a file. It still works. The only part that needs the network is the decoder itself, around two megabytes, fetched once the first time you use it, because no browser outside Safari can read HEIC on its own.