Convert HEIC to PNG

How to convert HEIC to PNG

1. Drop your HEIC files into the box above, or click to browse. You can also paste with Ctrl+V.
2. Adjust quality or resizing under Conversion settings if you need to. The defaults suit most photos.
3. Conversion starts automatically and runs on your device — watch the progress bar for each file.
4. Download files individually, or grab everything as a ZIP.

What changes when you convert HEIC to PNG

The reason to choose PNG over JPG as a destination for HEIC is generational loss, and it is worth being precise about what that means.

Your camera already compressed the photo once when it wrote the HEIC. Converting to JPG compresses it a second time, on top of artefacts that are already there. At quality 85 or above this is invisible, but it is real, and it is permanent. Converting to PNG instead decodes the HEIC to raw pixels and stores those pixels exactly — the output is precisely what the HEIC decoder produced, with nothing further discarded.

The price is size, and the price is steep. A 2 MB HEIC becomes roughly a 20 MB PNG. That ratio surprises people, but it follows directly from what the two formats do: HEIC uses a modern video codec to predict and discard, PNG uses DEFLATE to compress without discarding anything. Photographic content, full of fine detail and sensor noise, is close to incompressible losslessly.

Metadata is the other significant difference from the JPG route. JPEG has a mature, universally supported EXIF container; PNG's equivalent arrived late and is read inconsistently, so camera information, dates and GPS coordinates are effectively lost in this conversion. If you rely on your photo library organising by date and place, that is a real cost — and if you are publishing the photo, the same fact is a privacy benefit.

What PNG does carry, which JPG cannot, is transparency. Most iPhone photographs have no alpha channel, so this rarely matters. It matters for screenshots and for images that have already been through background removal.

What is preserved

• Every pixel exactly as the HEIC decoded — PNG adds no compression loss of its own
• The alpha channel, where the HEIF container carries one
• Full pixel dimensions and applied orientation

What is lost

• EXIF metadata in practice: PNG support for it is poor and inconsistently read
• HDR gain maps, depth maps and portrait segmentation data
• 10-bit colour depth, reduced to 8-bit in the standard PNG path
• Live Photo motion, which lives in a separate video file

What is altered

• File size increases substantially — often five to ten times the HEIC
• The image is decoded to raw pixels and re-encoded losslessly, so no generational damage occurs

PNG support in browsers and operating systems

Checked on 2026-08-10. We re-verify this table every quarter.

When not to convert HEIC to PNG

Do not convert to PNG if the photograph is going to be shared, emailed or uploaded. A 20 MB file will hit attachment limits and upload quotas that a 2 MB JPG sails past, and nobody looking at it will see the difference.

Do not convert to PNG for archiving photographs. It preserves the pixels but discards the EXIF, which for an archive is usually the wrong trade. Keep the original HEIC, or convert to TIFF, which is lossless and stores metadata properly.

Do not convert if you need the camera metadata downstream — use the JPG route instead, which carries EXIF across intact.

If you want lossless *and* smaller, WebP in lossless mode is around 25–30% below PNG on the same image and every current browser reads it.

Frequently asked questions