Convert HEIC to PNG
Drop your iPhone photo and download it as PNG — lossless from here on.
Drop an image here
or
PNG, JPG, WEBP, HEIC, AVIF, JXL, GIF, BMP, TIFF and SVG · up to 20 MB
HEIC to PNG or to JPG: which one you want
Your iPhone has saved to HEIC since iOS 11, and there are two sensible ways out. The usual one is JPG, because it's small and everything opens it. This page is for the other one: the choice you make when the photo isn't going out as-is but through an editor first.
The difference is in what happens after the conversion, not in the conversion itself.
To edit without degrading
JPG recompresses on every save. If you're going to crop, adjust colour, retouch and save again, each step layers a little more loss on the last. PNG loses nothing at any of those steps. Convert up front, work in PNG, and decide at the end what format to deliver.
To cut out the background
A cut-out needs transparency and JPG hasn't got it: everything outside the subject would come back filled with a colour. PNG is the right format to hold that result, and it's what the remove background tool returns.
Mind the order, though: converting to PNG doesn't remove the background, it only prepares the container. If the cut-out is what you're after, go straight to remove background — it takes the HEIC as it is and hands back a PNG with transparency.
What it costs
The file grows a lot, often fivefold or more. HEIC is among the most efficient codecs there is and PNG discards absolutely nothing, so the gap is what it is. And there's a quiet loss worth knowing about: EXIF metadata doesn't carry over to PNG. Date, camera model and coordinates are left behind. If that matters to you, the destination you want is JPG.
Common questions
- PNG or JPG for an iPhone photo?
- If you're sending, uploading or printing it, JPG: far smaller and everyone opens it just the same. If you're editing in several passes or cutting out the background, PNG: it doesn't lose quality on every save and it supports transparency.
- Do I get back the quality HEIC had discarded?
- No. HEIC compresses lossily, and what it threw away isn't in the file. PNG preserves losslessly whatever it receives, which arrives already compressed. The gain is that nothing more is lost from here on.
- How big will it be?
- Considerably bigger: a PNG five times the size of the HEIC or more is normal, because it discards nothing. If size matters and you don't need to edit, JPG is the better destination.
- Does it let me remove the background?
- PNG is the right format to save that result in, because it supports transparency, but converting doesn't remove any background on its own. That's what the remove background tool is for, finding the main subject and clearing the rest.
- Are the date and location kept?
- No. EXIF data doesn't survive the move to PNG, because PNG doesn't use that container. If you need to keep date, camera and coordinates, convert to JPG, which does.