About HeicToPng

In 2017, Apple quietly switched iPhones from JPEG to HEIC — High Efficiency Image Container. On paper, it's a better format: smaller files, better quality, support for transparency and animation. On your iPhone, you'd never notice the change.

The problem starts the moment your photo leaves the Apple ecosystem. Email a HEIC to a friend on Windows and they get a file their Photos app refuses to open. Upload it to a WordPress blog and the preview stays blank. Drop it into a Slack thread, a job application, an Etsy listing, or a school portal — silence. PNG and JPG still rule the web, and HEIC doesn't play nice with most of it.

That's where converters come in. And that's where it gets frustrating. Most online HEIC converters force you to create an account, slap a watermark on the result, cap your batch size, or quietly upload your personal photos to a server you know nothing about. Some of them hold your files for "processing" long after you've closed the tab.

We thought there should be a better way. HeicToPng is what we built.

Your photo library is one of the most personal datasets you own. It's where your family, your travel, your kids, your apartment keys on the kitchen counter, your medical documents, and your expiring credit cards quietly pile up over the years.

Handing that to an unknown server — even for a "quick conversion" — is a bigger deal than it sounds. Most online converters don't publish a data retention policy. The ones that do often reserve the right to store, analyze, or train models on whatever you upload. A HEIC file also carries EXIF metadata: GPS coordinates, device model, timestamps. Upload it, and you're handing over a breadcrumb trail about where you were and when.

HeicToPng sidesteps all of that by refusing to accept your files in the first place. We can't leak what we don't have. We can't sell what we can't see. And we can't be compelled to hand over files we never received.

iPhone owners sending photos to a friend, a colleague, or a relative stuck on a non-Apple device. Designers and bloggers pulling reference shots off their phone and into Photoshop, Figma, or WordPress. Developers handling user uploads that arrive as HEIC when the spec says "image/jpeg". Job applicants uploading a portrait that the application portal refuses to accept. Students submitting assignments through a school system that predates the iPhone.

If you've ever hit "can't open this file" and had to Google what HEIC even stands for, HeicToPng is for you.

HeicToPng is built and maintained by a small team that got tired of uploading personal photos to shady converters. The product is free, ad-supported in a light-touch way, and funded by our other work. We don't run A/B tests on dark patterns, we don't gate useful features behind a paid tier, and we don't plan to.

We also don't claim the product is perfect. If a conversion fails, if a locale reads weirdly, or if a specific HEIC flavor trips the decoder, we want to hear about it. Small bug reports from real users are how every release since launch has gotten better.