Easily convert multiple HEIC photos to high-quality PNG format for universal device compatibility.
When Apple switched from JPG to HEIC in iOS 11, they reduced photo file sizes by roughly 50% while maintaining comparable visual quality. The format is based on HEVC (H.265) video compression — essentially, each photo is treated as a single frame of a highly compressed video stream.
This is clever engineering. It is also the root of the problem.
HEVC decoding requires licensing. Microsoft doesn't ship Windows with HEVC support pre-installed because of patent and licensing costs. Linux distributions face similar constraints. Adobe added HEIC support to Photoshop in 2018, but only for Creative Cloud subscribers running recent versions. Many free image editors — GIMP, Paint.NET, IrfanView — need third-party plugins or don't support HEIC at all.
The result: you take a photo on your iPhone, AirDrop it to your MacBook (which opens it fine), then email it to a client on Windows and receive a reply saying "I can't open this file."
Converting to PNG solves this permanently. PNG has been an open, royalty-free format since 1996. Every operating system, every browser, every email client, and every image editor supports it natively. No codecs, no plugins, no extensions needed.
Search for "HEIC to PNG converter" and you'll find dozens of free tools. Nearly all of them work the same way: you upload your photo to their server, the server converts it, and you download the result.
What happens on that server is opaque. Most services claim they delete files after conversion, but "after" might mean 1 hour, 24 hours, or "when we get around to it." Some services' terms of service grant them a license to use uploaded content. Others are ad-supported platforms where file uploads generate traffic data used for ad targeting.
For a photo of a sunset, this probably doesn't matter. But iPhones store photos with EXIF metadata that includes:
Uploading a photo with this metadata to an unknown server means handing over a detailed location history tied to a specific device. For journalists, activists, medical professionals, or anyone photographing sensitive documents, this is a real threat — not a theoretical one.
Browser-based conversion eliminates this risk entirely. The file stays in your device's memory, is processed locally, and the output is generated without any network transmission of image data.
There's no magic here — just smart engineering that leverages what modern browsers can already do.
When you select a HEIC file, the browser's File API reads the raw binary data into memory. A JavaScript decoder (compiled from C/C++ code using WebAssembly) parses the HEIC container, extracts the HEVC-compressed image stream, and decodes it into raw pixel data — an array of red, green, blue, and alpha values for every pixel.
That pixel data is written to an HTML canvas element, which exists only in the browser's memory. The canvas is then exported as a PNG file using the browser's built-in toBlob() or toDataURL() API, which handles PNG compression natively.
The entire pipeline — read, decode, render, encode — happens on your device's processor. No image data is sent to Pixes servers or any other endpoint. This isn't a privacy policy promise; it's a technical architecture that makes uploading unnecessary.
You can verify this by disconnecting from Wi-Fi after loading the page and converting a file offline. It still works.
Both PNG and JPG are universally supported. The choice between them depends on what you plan to do with the converted file.
Choose PNG when:
Choose JPG when:
For a typical iPhone photo at 4032×3024 pixels, expect the following rough file sizes:
If you need JPG output instead of PNG, the HEIC to JPG converter applies lossy compression with adjustable quality settings. For batch processing multiple iPhone photos at once, bulk HEIC to JPG handles dozens of files in a single session.
Most people convert HEIC to PNG because of compatibility. Few realize the conversion also removes embedded metadata — and that's arguably the more valuable outcome.
Every iPhone photo contains an EXIF data block that records, among other things, the exact GPS coordinates where the photo was taken. Share that photo publicly — on a forum, a marketplace listing, a social media post — and you're potentially broadcasting your home address, workplace, or daily routine.
Standard HEIC-to-PNG conversion does not carry EXIF metadata into the output file. PNG uses a different metadata structure (tEXt, iTXt, and zTXt chunks), and the conversion process doesn't migrate EXIF fields into these PNG-specific chunks. The result is a clean image file with no embedded location, device, or timestamp information.
This happens automatically during conversion. You don't need to check a box or configure a setting.
For cases where you want to retain metadata, the situation is more nuanced. Some specialized tools can embed EXIF data into PNG files, but this is uncommon and most workflows don't require it. If you need the original metadata later, keep the HEIC file as your archive master and use the PNG for distribution.
Modern iPhone cameras produce images at 12MP to 48MP depending on the model. At 48MP (iPhone 14 Pro and later), a single HEIC file can be 5-8 MB, and the converted PNG can reach 40-60 MB. Processing these files locally requires your browser to allocate sufficient memory — typically 2-4x the uncompressed image size during conversion.
On a modern desktop or laptop (8GB+ RAM), this is a non-issue. On older mobile devices with limited memory, you may hit browser memory limits when converting very large files. If the browser tab crashes, try converting on a desktop, or use the HEIC to JPG tool instead — JPG encoding requires less memory because it processes the image in smaller tiles.
For single-file conversions, the browser-based approach is ideal. If you're converting hundreds of iPhone photos — say, migrating an entire photo library away from HEIC — a desktop application with native HEVC decoding will be faster, though you lose the zero-upload privacy guarantee unless the application is specifically designed for local-only processing.
A practical middle ground: convert your most sensitive photos (documents, IDs, anything with location data you'd rather not broadcast) using a browser-based tool. Convert bulk vacation or landscape photos using any method that's convenient, since the privacy stakes are lower.