Convert HEIC to PNG
Convert iPhone HEIC photos to PNG without uploading them. Useful when you need transparency support or a lossless copy to edit.
Drop HEIC files here or paste from the clipboard.
Your files are processed on this device. Nothing is uploaded.
What actually changes
PNG stores every pixel exactly as decoded rather than approximating them, so nothing is thrown away in the second compression step the way it is with JPG. The cost is size: a photograph as PNG is frequently five to ten times larger than the HEIC it came from, because lossless compression has very little to work with on continuous-tone photographic data. PNG also supports an alpha channel, which matters if the HEIC came from a screenshot or a graphic rather than a camera.
| HEIC | PNG | |
|---|---|---|
| Compression | Lossy | Lossless |
| Transparency | Yes | Yes |
| Format can be animated | No | No |
PNG is the wrong choice for a photograph
If the source is a normal camera photo, converting to PNG produces an enormous file for no visible benefit, because the HEIC already discarded the detail that lossless compression would have preserved. PNG earns its size on screenshots, diagrams, logos and anything with flat colour or transparency. For photographs, JPG at high quality is smaller and looks the same.
When PNG is the right target
Three cases make PNG the better choice than JPG for a HEIC.
The first is a screenshot. iPhone screenshots are PNG already, but a screenshot that has been through Photos or a third party app can come back as HEIC and converting it to JPG would put compression artefacts on crisp text and interface edges for no reason.
The second is transparency. Rare from a camera, but HEIC is a container format and an image saved into it from a design tool can carry an alpha channel that JPG can’t hold.
The third is an editing workflow. If the image is about to be opened, altered and saved repeatedly, each save in a lossy format compounds the previous one’s damage. Working in PNG until the final export avoids that entirely.
The size problem, in numbers
A twelve megapixel photo is a little over twelve million pixels and PNG must describe each one. Even with its filtering and deflate compression, photographic noise leaves very little redundancy to exploit, so the result lands somewhere between twenty and forty megabytes. The same photo as a quality 85 JPG is typically two to four. If you’re converting a batch to email or to upload, PNG is very likely the wrong answer.
Common questions
Should I choose PNG or JPG for my iPhone photos?
JPG for photographs, nearly always. PNG makes sense when the image is a screenshot, has transparency or is going into an editing workflow where you’ll save it repeatedly and don’t want each save to compound compression damage. A holiday photo gains nothing from PNG except twenty megabytes.
Is converting HEIC to PNG lossless?
The PNG encoding step is lossless, but the whole conversion isn’t, because the HEIC itself was lossy. You’re preserving the decoded result perfectly, not recovering the detail the phone discarded when it took the photo. Nothing can recover that.
Why is my PNG so much bigger than the original?
Because lossless compression can’t cheat. JPEG and HEIC achieve their size by approximating and the approximation is invisible to you but enormous in terms of bytes. PNG has to describe every pixel accurately and photographic noise is close to incompressible, so a 2MB HEIC routinely becomes a 15MB PNG.
Does the transparency come through?
If the HEIC has an alpha channel, yes and that is a real reason to pick PNG over JPG, which can’t store transparency at all. Camera photos have no transparency, so in practice this only matters for images that started life as graphics or screenshots.