HEIC to JPG / PNG Converter

HEIC, short for High Efficiency Image Container, is the photo format Apple adopted as the iPhone default starting with iOS 11 in 2017. Using the HEVC codec, HEIC produces photos that are typically thirty to fifty percent smaller than JPEG at the same visual quality. For Apple users this is a clear win: the camera roll takes less space, iCloud syncs faster, and AirDrop between iPhones and Macs is effortless. The format preserves modern features the camera captures — live photos, depth maps, wider color gamuts, burst sequences — inside a single container that older image formats simply cannot hold.

Outside the Apple ecosystem, HEIC is still a source of daily friction. Windows versions before 10 do not open HEIC without paid codecs from the Microsoft Store. Popular photo editors, design tools like older Figma versions, many Android galleries, email clients, web upload forms, e-commerce product-photo pipelines, CMS image uploaders, print-shop kiosks and legacy inventory systems all refuse HEIC. The workflow breaks at exactly the moment a user needs to share or use their photo, and the fix usually involves installing software, paying for a codec, or round-tripping through a cloud service that copies the photo to a server.

This converter is the opposite of that friction. You drop HEIC files into the dropzone, choose JPG or PNG, and the browser does the rest. The decoding engine is heic2any, a WebAssembly port of libheif that runs entirely on your machine. Your photos never travel over the network. No account is required, no watermark is added, no email is collected. The tool works the same on desktop Chrome, Firefox, Edge, Safari, and on mobile Safari and Chrome — and that mobile support matters because iPhones are where HEIC files come from in the first place. You can convert a batch straight from your phone and email or upload the results a moment later.

Choosing between JPG and PNG depends on what the photo will be used for. JPG is the right choice for almost every photograph: the compression is lossy but tuned for continuous-tone images, so you can shrink a fifteen-megabyte HEIC into a one-megabyte JPG that looks identical on screen. JPG files open everywhere, display inline in email, upload to every website, and embed into documents without extra steps. PNG is lossless, which means every pixel is preserved exactly, and PNG supports transparency. For a photograph the transparency advantage is usually irrelevant, but the lossless guarantee matters when the image will be edited further, printed at high resolution, or archived. PNG files are also two to five times larger than JPG for the same photo.

The quality slider controls how aggressive the JPG encoder is. The default value of eighty-five is a deliberate choice: it is the point at which experienced photo editors can no longer tell the difference between the original and the compressed result on a normal screen. Pushing to ninety-five or one hundred keeps every last detail but nearly doubles the file size, which is worth it only for prints or for images where you will zoom to one-to-one pixel density. Lowering to seventy-five or sixty-five can still look fine on social media or in chat, and the savings are substantial. If you are preparing photos for a website or email, eighty-five is the best default; if you are archiving memories, ninety-five preserves more headroom for future edits.

Batch processing is handled one file at a time in the background, with per-file status shown in the list below the upload zone. HEIC decoding is not instant: a twelve-megapixel iPhone photo takes roughly one to three seconds to decode in a modern browser, because the HEVC math is doing real work. This is the price of running a sophisticated codec in JavaScript rather than on a server with native libraries. The upside is complete privacy and zero upload time, which actually makes the overall experience faster than cloud-based converters for small batches. For larger batches, a progress indicator tells you exactly where the tool is, and you can continue working in another tab while conversion runs.

When multiple files are finished, a Download All as ZIP button appears. Instead of clicking twenty individual download buttons, you get a single ZIP that preserves the original file names with the new extension — a photo that came in as IMG_0042.HEIC leaves as IMG_0042.jpg. The ZIP is assembled using JSZip, again entirely in the browser, so the full conversion is one uninterrupted local pipeline from drop to download. Once you have the ZIP on disk, you can rename, re-organize, or re-upload it anywhere that accepts standard JPG or PNG files — which is essentially everywhere on the modern internet.

Privacy is the core reason to use a browser-based converter rather than a website that asks you to upload. Photos often carry context they should not: a HEIC taken on an iPhone can embed the precise GPS coordinates of where the shot was captured, the device model and serial identifiers, the date, the focal length, and in the case of live photos, a three-second audio and video clip. When you upload a HEIC to an online converter you are implicitly trusting that operator with all of that metadata, as well as the photo itself. Uploaded files typically pass through load balancers, storage buckets, conversion workers, and log pipelines that can cache or retain data for hours or days, even when a privacy policy promises otherwise. A client-side converter removes that attack surface entirely: the bytes are read from the local file system, decoded in the browser, and written back to the same disk. Nothing else happens.

For power users, this tool integrates cleanly with other Omnvert image utilities. After converting HEIC to JPG, you can feed the JPG into the [EXIF Remover](/tools/exif-remover) to strip location and device metadata before sharing. If you need smaller files for web delivery, pair this with the PNG to AVIF or JPEG to AVIF converters to get roughly half the size at identical quality. For bulk resizing before upload, the Resize tool accepts JPG and PNG directly. The entire toolkit is designed to chain together inside a single browser tab, never requiring a file to touch a server.

One practical tip: browsers sometimes hold on to large decoded images in memory longer than necessary. If you plan to convert a very large batch — say, fifty or more high-resolution photos — it helps to work in groups of ten to twenty at a time, downloading the ZIP and clearing the list between groups. The Clear All button releases all object URLs and lets the browser reclaim memory. On mobile devices, where RAM is more constrained, shorter batches also reduce the chance of Safari killing the tab during a long decoding job.

Finally, a note on why the format matters in the first place. HEIC is technically a better format than JPEG by almost every measure: better compression, wider color, richer metadata, and a more modern specification. The only reason JPEG still dominates the open web is that it has forty years of universal support behind it. A converter like this one exists to bridge the gap between a better private format and the lingua franca of the public web. Apple will keep taking HEIC photos; the rest of the internet will keep expecting JPG and PNG; and in between, a small WebAssembly binary running in your browser is enough to make the handoff painless.

From a developer perspective, this tool is a small but illustrative example of how WebAssembly changes the economics of browser applications. Ten years ago, decoding HEIC in JavaScript was effectively impossible — the HEVC specification is dense, the reference implementations are written in C, and a pure-JavaScript port would be too slow to be usable. Compiling libheif to WebAssembly closes that gap: the same C code that runs natively on a Mac or Windows machine now runs inside a secure browser sandbox at roughly native speed, no plugin required. That is why heic2any works on a Chromebook, on an older Windows laptop without codec packs, on a Linux machine with no Apple software installed anywhere, and on a mobile iPhone where the Photos app is the source of the files in the first place.