HEIC to PNG Converter — Free, Lossless, In-Browser

Why your browser cannot open HEIC files

HEIC has been the default camera format on iPhones since iOS 11, but no major desktop browser can decode it natively. Double-clicking a .heic file on Windows, or dragging one into a browser tab, often shows nothing at all — not because the file is corrupt, but because the decoder simply is not there. Nearly every other image format has built-in support; HEIC is the conspicuous exception, which is why so many people first encounter it as a file that mysteriously will not open.

How this tool decodes HEIC in the browser

Because the browser cannot help, this converter ships an actual decoder: heic2any, which is the libheif library compiled to WebAssembly. That bundle is roughly 1.4 MB, so it is lazy-loaded on first use only — it costs nothing until you convert something, and it never weighs on any other page. Expect a brief pause on your first conversion while it downloads; subsequent files are quick.

Everything still runs locally. Nothing is uploaded, which matters more than usual here, because HEIC files taken straight off a phone are personal photos and frequently carry location data.

Why PNG, and what it costs

PNG is lossless, so nothing is discarded beyond what the camera already committed when it wrote the HEIC. That makes it the right target when the photo is heading into an editor for retouching, compositing or repeated saving — a lossy intermediate would lose a little on every save.

The cost is size. A lossless PNG of a 12-megapixel photo is typically much larger than the HEIC it came from, often several times over, because HEIC is a modern efficient codec and PNG's compression was never designed for photographic data. If you are simply sharing or uploading a finished photo, HEIC to JPG is the better choice. Because PNG is lossless, the quality slider does not apply to this conversion.

Two limitations to know before you start

Live Photos and bursts give you one frame. A HEIC file can contain more than one image, and Live Photos and burst captures are stored exactly that way. This tool takes the first image only. You get the still frame — never the motion, and never the rest of the burst.

Rotation is applied for you. A photo taken with the phone held sideways stores its pixels in the sensor's orientation plus a rotation flag, and the decoder returns those raw pixels without acting on the flag — which is why HEIC conversions so often come out sideways elsewhere. The flag is read here and the rotation is baked into the pixels, because a JPG or PNG written from a canvas carries no EXIF at all: the rotation has to be applied rather than passed along. When a rotation is needed the intermediate step is lossless, so a JPG still takes only one lossy encode.

What happens when a file fails

A file that cannot be decoded reports its own name followed by a message asking whether it is a valid HEIC or HEIF file. A failure on one file does not stop the rest — the tool moves on and converts everything else in the batch, so you only need to deal with the file that actually failed. The usual cause is a file that is not really HEIC despite its extension.