HEIC to PNG

HEIC is what an iPhone has saved photos in by default since iOS 11, and it stores roughly twice the image in the same space as JPG. The catch is that it is built on the HEVC/H.265 video codec, which is covered by patent pools — so most browsers, a great deal of Windows software and plenty of Android apps simply refuse to open a .heic file without an extra codec install.

PNG is the opposite kind of format: unremarkable, ancient by software standards, and understood by absolutely everything. Choosing it over JPG comes down to one thing — PNG is lossless. The HEIC was already lossily compressed when your phone wrote it, and converting to JPG compresses it a second time. Converting to PNG does not, so what you get is exactly what the decoder produced. For a photo you intend to edit, retouch, print or archive, that matters.

The trade is file size. A HEIC that occupies 2 MB on your phone can easily become a 10–15 MB PNG, because PNG never discards anything. If you only need to email the photo or post it, JPG is the better destination and the size difference is dramatic.

Almost every tool on oMyImage works inside your browser tab. HEIC is the exception, and the reason is legal rather than technical. Every JavaScript HEIC decoder in existence — heic2any, heic-decode, heic-convert, libheif-js — is the same libheif library underneath, and libheif is LGPL-3.0. Putting that in a browser bundle counts as distribution, which brings obligations a minified webpack chunk cannot satisfy.

So the decoding happens on our server instead, where running the library is not distribution. Your file is sent over an encrypted HTTPS connection, converted, and deleted immediately afterwards. We do not keep it, index it or use it for anything else. This is the only category of tool here that works that way, and the pages that do say so plainly rather than claiming a privacy property they do not have.

If you would rather not convert every time, the phone can be told to stop. Under Settings, in the Camera section, the Formats screen offers 'Most Compatible' — choose it and the camera writes JPG from then on. You lose some storage efficiency and it does not touch the photos you already have, but new shots stop being a problem.

There is a second setting worth knowing about. Under Photos, the option to transfer to Mac or PC can be set to 'Automatic', which converts HEIC to JPG as it copies. If it is set to 'Keep Originals' you get the .heic files unchanged, which is often where a folder of unopenable photos comes from in the first place.

Choose PNG when the photo is going into an editor, when you will re-save it more than once, when it contains text or a screenshot-like flat area that JPG would blur, or when you want an archival copy that will not degrade further.

Choose JPG when the photo is a normal camera snapshot destined for email, a message, a website or a print service. It is a fraction of the size and the quality difference is invisible at sensible settings. The toggle above switches between the two without re-uploading, so you can try both.