Convert HEIC to PNG — lossless output for editing and design work
Drop a HEIC photo below and get a lossless PNG that opens in every design tool, on every operating system. Decoding runs locally in your browser — nothing is uploaded.
Your file is processed entirely in your browser. Nothing is uploaded.
HEIC and PNG were built for opposite jobs. HEIC is a delivery format: its whole purpose is to store a photograph as compactly as possible on a phone, and it does that by throwing away visual information you were unlikely to notice. PNG is a working format: it is mathematically lossless, so every pixel you decode is a pixel you keep, no matter how many times the file is opened, edited, and re-saved. When you pull a photo off an iPhone in order to actually do something with it — crop it, annotate it, place it in a Figma frame, paste it into a bug report or a technical document — PNG is the safer landing format, because it guarantees no further compression damage will ever accumulate.
The conversion runs entirely on your device. libheif, the reference open-source HEIF decoder, is compiled to WebAssembly and executed in a background Web Worker to unpack the HEVC-compressed image into raw RGBA pixels. Those pixels are then written out as PNG with lossless DEFLATE compression. There is no quality setting because there is no quality decision to make: PNG output is exact by definition. Be ready for the file size, though — PNG has no lossy mode, so a 2 MB HEIC photo commonly becomes a 15 to 25 MB PNG. If you are not going to edit the result, JPG or WEBP will serve you far better.
How to convert HEIC to PNG in 4 steps
- 1
Select your HEIC photo
Drop the .heic or .heif file into the dropzone above, or click to browse. Files straight off an iPhone, an iPad, or an Apple Photos export all work unchanged.
- 2
Nothing to configure
PNG is lossless, so there is no quality slider to set and no trade-off to weigh. Conversion starts the moment the file lands in the dropzone.
- 3
Let libheif decode the photo
The decoder runs in a background worker, so the page never freezes. A 12-megapixel photo takes one to three seconds to decode and write out as PNG.
- 4
Download your PNG
Save the file and open it in any editor, design tool, or documentation pipeline. Expect a considerably larger file than the HEIC — that is what lossless means.
HEIC vs PNG: compact delivery vs lossless master
HEIC compresses a still image with HEVC, the video codec behind 4K streaming. It is extraordinarily efficient on photographic content — continuous gradients, skin tones, foliage — because it discards detail using a perceptual model of human vision. That efficiency comes at a permanent cost: the discarded information is gone, and every additional lossy re-save removes a bit more. PNG does the exact opposite. It uses DEFLATE, the same lossless algorithm as ZIP, combined with predictive filtering across scanlines. Nothing is discarded, so a PNG can be opened, edited, and re-saved a thousand times without degrading by a single pixel. The catch is that DEFLATE was designed for flat colours and sharp edges, not photographs. On a screenshot or a logo, PNG is competitive with anything. On a 12-megapixel photo of a landscape, PNG produces a file ten times larger than the HEIC it came from, because there is essentially no redundancy for a lossless algorithm to exploit. The practical rule: PNG when the photo is going into an editing workflow or needs transparency, JPG or WEBP when it is going out to be viewed.
When should you convert HEIC to PNG?
Annotating a photo for documentation
Photos of hardware, whiteboards, error screens, or paperwork often need arrows, boxes, and text on top. Working in PNG means the annotations stay crisp and no JPG artifacts creep in around them.
Importing into a design tool
Figma, Sketch, Affinity, and Illustrator all read PNG natively and none of them read HEIC reliably. PNG is the format that imports without a plugin on every platform.
Keeping a lossless master before editing
If a photo will go through several rounds of cropping, colour correction, and re-export, converting to PNG once locks in the current pixels. Every later save is then free of generational loss.
Preserving transparency
HEIC supports an alpha channel, and so does PNG. If your file has transparent areas — rare on camera photos, common on exported graphics — PNG is the only output here that keeps them.
Frequently asked questions
- Why is the PNG so much larger than the HEIC?
- Because PNG never throws anything away. HEIC uses HEVC’s perceptual compression to discard detail your eye is unlikely to register, typically achieving a 10:1 or better ratio on photos. PNG only applies lossless DEFLATE, which finds almost no redundancy in photographic noise. A 10x size increase between the two is completely normal and is not a sign that anything went wrong.
- Does converting to PNG improve the quality of my photo?
- No, and nothing can. PNG preserves exactly the pixels that come out of the HEIC decoder, including whatever detail HEVC compression already removed when the photo was taken. What PNG gives you is a guarantee going forward: from this point on, no further quality is lost no matter how many times you edit and re-save.
- Should I pick PNG or JPG for my iPhone photos?
- JPG if the photo is being sent, uploaded, or viewed — it is universally supported and a fraction of the size. PNG if the photo is being edited, annotated, or imported into design software, where lossless matters more than bytes. If the destination is a website, skip both and use WEBP.
- Is transparency preserved?
- Yes. Both HEIC and PNG carry a full alpha channel, so any transparent pixels in the source survive the conversion intact. This is the main reason to choose PNG over JPG when your HEIC came from a graphics export rather than a camera — JPG would flatten transparency to solid white.
- Does the photo leave my device?
- Never. The libheif decoder is WebAssembly running inside your browser tab and the PNG encoding happens on your device’s Canvas. There is no upload step in the conversion path, which means there is no server that could store, index, or leak your photos.