Get a lossless PNG out of the HEIC an iPhone saved, at the full size the camera recorded.
A HEIC is what the camera produced; a PNG is a file you can edit, paste and hand in.
Apple's High Efficiency format, the camera default since iOS 11, squeezes a photo into about half a JPEG by compressing it with HEVC. That is excellent for a phone that has to keep thousands of pictures, and awkward the moment you want to do something with one. PNG keeps every pixel exactly as decoded, so a crop, a resize or a tenth save changes only what you changed instead of adding another layer of softness.
Editors, slide decks, documentation and issue trackers, CMS upload fields and a long list of print or application forms accept PNG as a matter of course and answer "unsupported file type" to a .heic — many Windows machines cannot even draw a thumbnail of one without extra codecs. A PNG is the format those tools were built around.
A photo from the camera is opaque, and it stays opaque here. What PNG adds is the option: the moment you cut the subject out of the picture, delete a background or paste a logo on top, the empty areas are stored as transparent instead of turning into a white or black block, which is exactly what would happen in a JPG.
All of the picture, none of the extras that made the file small.
Every pixel the camera recorded is written into the PNG — 4032 x 3024 for a 12 megapixel photo, more for the newer sensors — and the rotation stored in the file is applied, so the PNG is the right way up with width and height already matching. Leave the width field empty and the size is exactly the original.
PNG is lossless, so it stores what the decoder produced instead of what a compressor estimated. A photo that was 3 MB as a HEIC routinely lands between 15 and 30 MB, because a phone-sized image is a lot of pixels and none of them are being thrown away. That is the price of an exact copy, and it is the one thing to check before uploading the result somewhere with a size limit.
A HEIC is a container, not a single picture: it can hold the short video of a Live Photo, the depth map Portrait mode measured, a thumbnail and the frames of a burst. A PNG holds one image, so the motion is gone, the depth map cannot be used to re-blur the background afterwards, and only the main image of the file is converted. The photo itself looks exactly as it did on the phone.
Camera model, lens, timestamps and GPS coordinates are not written into the PNG, so the file you hand over says nothing about where the photo was taken. Colour is brought to sRGB, which is what browsers, editors and printers expect, so the picture should not shift hue when it opens somewhere else.
Three steps, and there is almost nothing to decide.
Drag it onto the box, click to browse, or paste it with Ctrl+V (Cmd+V on a Mac). Up to 25 MB per file, and a .heif extension is treated the same way. Photos exported from iCloud or saved out of a shared album work like ones taken on the phone.
PNG is already chosen and the quality field has nothing to do, because a PNG is lossless — there is no detail to trade away. Type a width only if you want a specific pixel size; the height follows the aspect ratio and the image is never enlarged.
The preview shows the result and its weight, which is worth a glance for a photo this large. One click saves the .png under the original name, ready for an editor, a slide, a document or a form that only accepts PNG.
PNG is a good answer, but it is not always the right one.
Settings → Camera → Formats → Most Compatible makes the camera record JPEG (and H.264 video) from the next shot on, so nothing needs converting in the first place. It costs storage — roughly twice the space per photo — which is the trade Apple avoids by default.
If the destination is a chat, an email or a website, nobody will notice the losslessness and everybody notices the size. Convert the photo to JPG instead, or run the result through the JPG compressor to bring the weight back down to a few hundred kilobytes.
Each conversion is a fresh decode, so keep the HEIC or JPG you started with rather than converting its PNG again and again. When you already have a JPG that has to become a PNG, JPG to PNG does that trip in one step, and the image converter covers WebP, AVIF and ICO as well.
Yes. No account, no payment and no watermark on the PNG, and you can convert as many photos as you need. The only limit is a short rate limit that keeps the service usable for everyone.
Because the HEIC compresses the image with HEVC and a PNG does not compress it at all beyond a lossless filter: one throws detail away, the other keeps every pixel. For a 12 megapixel photo the step from a few megabytes to roughly twenty is normal. If you need a small file rather than an exact one, JPG is the better target.
Up to 25 MB per file and 50 megapixels per image, which is beyond anything an iPhone produces, including 48 megapixel shots. If the upload is refused, the file is probably not a photo: check that you picked the .heic rather than a video or an edited copy.
Files are processed on our server and not stored. The HEIC is decoded, converted and sent back to your browser as a PNG, and no account is involved.
Not yet: one photo per run for now, so a full album means going through the steps again for every picture. With hundreds to do, changing the iPhone to Most Compatible (Settings → Camera → Formats) or exporting a batch as PNG from the Photos app on a Mac is quicker.
