A lossless copy of your iPhone photo
HEIC is the format iPhones and iPads use to save photos in “High Efficiency” mode. Most image editors, design tools and older apps on Windows and Linux still can’t open it. PNG is the safe choice when you plan to keep working on the picture: it is lossless, so you can open, edit and save it again and again without the quality loss that repeated JPG saves cause.
This tool reads your HEIC photo and saves it as a PNG at full resolution. There are no settings, because PNG has no quality level to choose — every pixel of the decoded photo is stored exactly.
When PNG is the right choice
| You want to… | Best output |
|---|---|
| Edit in GIMP, Photoshop, Figma or Canva and save several times | PNG |
| Add text, arrows or a frame and keep edges crisp | PNG |
| Send by email, post online, store many photos | JPG |
| Upload to a website with a file size limit | JPG, then Compress Image |
In short: PNG for working files, JPG for finished ones (see HEIC vs JPG for how the two compare). If you converted to PNG for editing, you can always make a smaller JPG of the final version with PNG to JPG.
What to expect from the file
- Size: a PNG photo is large. Expect several times the size of the HEIC, depending on how detailed the picture is. A clear blue sky compresses well; foliage or gravel does not.
- Resolution: the same width and height as the photo, for example 4032 × 3024 for a 12-megapixel iPhone camera.
- Colors: the PNG is saved in standard 8-bit color by the browser. HDR highlights and wide-gamut colors in recent iPhone photos are mapped to normal range, so very bright or saturated areas can look slightly flatter.
- Live Photos: only the still image is converted; the short video part is a separate file.
How the conversion works
Safari on recent Apple devices decodes HEIC natively, so the photo is read directly. Chrome, Edge and Firefox can’t, so the page loads a WebAssembly build of the open-source libheif decoder (about 3 MB, served from this site and cached) the first time you convert. The browser then writes the PNG. No server sees your photo at any point.
Privacy
Because the PNG is rebuilt from pixels, the original’s EXIF metadata — including the GPS position where the photo was taken — is not carried over. That makes a converted PNG safe to share without revealing where you live. To inspect the metadata of the original before you delete it, use the EXIF Viewer, and for JPG or WebP files you want to clean without changing format, use Remove EXIF Data.