HEIC to PNG
An iPhone file opens right in the tab and saves as PNG. Nothing is uploaded anywhere, and portrait shots do not come out sideways. On our corpus a 1200×800 frame in PNG averages 1489 kB for a photograph and 26 kB for flat graphics — 1318% of what JPEG takes at the same quality.
How to do it
- Pick a HEIC file, drag it in, or paste with Ctrl+V
- The format is already set to PNG
- Take the finished file. Several at once works too — you get a ZIP
Frequently asked questions
- How much smaller will the file be?
- On our corpus a 1200×800 frame in PNG averages 1489 kB for a photograph and 26 kB for flat graphics — 1318% of what JPEG takes at the same quality.
- Will PNG improve the quality?
- No. PNG losslessly preserves what has already been lost — the HEIC artefacts get written pixel for pixel. The file grows too: on photographs PNG comes out roughly thirteen times larger than JPEG. Reach for PNG when you need transparency or further editing.
- Why does HEIC need converting at all?
- The iPhone shoots HEIC because it compresses about twice as well as JPEG. Half the software out there will not open it. Here it is decoded inside your tab by libheif — the file is never sent anywhere. We cannot write HEIC: libheif only reads.
- Why do phone photos sometimes come out sideways?
- Because the orientation lives in a separate EXIF tag rather than in the pixels, and most converters ignore it. Here the tag is read and applied before anything else, so a portrait shot stays portrait.