HEIC to WebP Converter

WebP is an open image format developed by Google (2010 launch, universal browser support since 2020). It does both lossy and lossless compression in a single container and produces noticeably smaller files than the formats it competes with — about 25–35% smaller than JPG at equivalent visual quality, and roughly 50% smaller than PNG when lossless. For images that will live on the web — your site, an e-commerce gallery, an app store screenshot, anything served over HTTPS — WebP is usually the right delivery format. HEIC, by contrast, is iPhone-only in practice; almost no non-Apple software opens it without a plugin.

Default to lossy quality 90 for photographs (people, scenes, anything continuous-tone). Switch to lossless when the image has sharp edges, text, illustrations, or you intend to re-edit it later. Lossless WebP guarantees an exact pixel match to the source, which means no compounding compression damage if you re-edit and re-export down the line. Lossy WebP at 90 is visually indistinguishable from the source for almost any photo, but a second round of compression can introduce visible artifacts, so it's not the format to use as your editing master.

Yes — universally. Chrome, Edge, Firefox, Opera, Brave have shipped WebP support for a decade. Safari added it in version 14 (Sept 2020) on macOS Big Sur and iOS 14. As of 2024 the global "can use WebP in browsers" coverage is over 97%. The remaining gaps are old corporate Windows machines stuck on Internet Explorer or pre-2020 Android Web Views, which are rare in practice.

PNG uses DEFLATE compression, which is a general-purpose algorithm not specifically tuned for images. WebP's lossless mode uses image-aware techniques: a predictive transform that encodes each pixel as a delta from a guess based on its neighbours, plus an arithmetic coder that exploits local color statistics. The result preserves every pixel exactly — same as PNG — but encodes them more efficiently, which is why every modern site replacing PNG with lossless WebP sees roughly 50% byte savings.

If you toggle "Preserve EXIF metadata" in Advanced Settings, the date taken and most camera fields are carried over. Note that WebP's EXIF support is more limited in third-party tools than JPG's — some readers ignore the EXIF chunk in WebP entirely. If EXIF preservation matters more than file format, consider HEIC to JPG. If you want to share publicly without revealing your home address, leave EXIF off, or enable "Remove GPS location" so only the GPS block is wiped.

Most modern mail clients display WebP fine inline (Gmail web, Outlook web, Apple Mail since 2020), but a small slice of older corporate clients and some plain-text MUAs still don't — that's why JPG remains the safest format for cold email attachments. WebP shines for images served over HTTP (in a browser), not images shipped as MIME attachments. If your audience is a single corporate recipient on a 2015-vintage Outlook, send JPG instead.

Photoshop CC has supported WebP natively since version 23.2 (Feb 2022). Affinity Photo, Affinity Designer, and GIMP all read and write WebP. Lightroom Classic added WebP export in 11.0 (2021). Older versions of Photoshop need the WebPShop plugin from Google. So yes — for any editing tool released in the last few years, WebP is a first-class citizen.

Almost — modern best practice is to serve WebP via the <picture> element with a JPG fallback for the long tail of older browsers, or skip the fallback entirely if your traffic is 97%+ WebP-capable (most consumer sites are). For an Open Graph image (social-sharing preview), still ship JPG since Twitter/X, LinkedIn, and Slack scrape and re-host these and historically had spotty WebP support. For everything else — gallery, hero, product cards — WebP first.

Both. HEIC and HEIF share the same container and the same HEVC encoding — HEIC is just Apple's brand name for HEIF images. This tool decodes .heic and .heif identically and outputs the same WebP either way.