Why convert HEIC to PNG instead of JPG?
HEIC and JPG are both lossy formats: every time the image is saved, a little detail is permanently thrown away to make the file smaller. PNG is different. It uses lossless compression, which means it preserves every single pixel exactly as it was decoded from your HEIC photo. Nothing is approximated, nothing is blurred, and no compression artifacts are baked in. When you convert HEIC to PNG, you get a clean, pixel-perfect copy you can keep, edit, and re-save as many times as you like without it slowly degrading.
That makes PNG the right choice whenever quality matters more than file size: archiving an important photo, preparing an image for a designer, taking a screenshot you will mark up, or feeding a picture into editing software where you will crop, layer, and export it repeatedly. A JPG would lose a tiny bit of fidelity on every save; a PNG never does. The trade-off is that PNG files are larger — often several times the size of the HEIC they came from — which is the honest cost of keeping every pixel intact.
PNG keeps transparency — and HEIC photos sometimes need it
One thing JPG simply cannot do is transparency. A JPG always has a solid background; there is no such thing as a see-through pixel in the format. PNG, on the other hand, fully supports an alpha channel, so parts of the image can be transparent. This is the single biggest reason designers and developers reach for PNG instead of JPG.
If you have cut out a subject, removed a background, or exported a sticker, logo, or graphic from your iPhone, converting to PNG keeps those transparent areas intact instead of filling them with white. The same is true for screenshots of UI, diagrams, and any image with sharp edges or flat color — PNG renders crisp lines and clean edges without the fuzzy halos JPG compression tends to add around text and borders. For photographs the difference is subtle; for graphics it is the difference between usable and ruined.
Why won't my HEIC files open in Photoshop, Figma, or other editors?
HEIC is Apple's container format built on HEVC (H.265) video compression, and a surprising number of editing and design tools still cannot open it natively. Older versions of Photoshop, GIMP, many web-based editors, Figma, and countless smaller utilities will refuse a HEIC file or simply fail to import it. Even when an app technically supports HEIC, plugins and automation pipelines built around it are far less common than the rock-solid PNG support that has existed for decades.
Converting to PNG removes that wall completely. PNG has been a web and editing standard since 1996 and is supported by essentially every image editor, design tool, browser, operating system, and programming library on the planet. Once your iPhone photo is a PNG, you can drag it straight into your editor of choice, place it in a layout, run it through a script, or upload it to a service that rejects HEIC — with zero codec hassles.
Is it private? Are my photos uploaded anywhere?
Nothing is uploaded. This converter runs entirely inside your browser using WebAssembly, so your HEIC files are decoded and rebuilt as PNG on your own device. The image data never travels to a server, which means we physically cannot see, store, cache, or leak your photos. There is no account, no email, and no watermark stamped onto your image.
That privacy guarantee matters more for lossless work than people realize. The photos you most want to keep pixel-perfect — family pictures, documents, design assets, work-in-progress edits — are exactly the ones you least want sitting on a stranger's upload server. Because LivePhotoKit has no upload step at all, the tool also keeps working offline once the page has loaded, and there is no file-size cap imposed by a server.
How to batch-convert HEIC to PNG without losing quality
If you have many photos to convert, you do not need to repeat the process one file at a time. Tap “Choose Files” and select as many HEIC images as you want — dozens or hundreds. Each one is decoded locally and re-encoded as a lossless PNG, and you can download them individually or pull the whole set down as a single ZIP archive. Because PNG is lossless, every image in the batch comes out pixel-identical to its HEIC source, no matter how large the batch is.
Speed depends on your own hardware rather than a server queue, so there is nothing to wait in line for. Keep in mind that a folder of PNGs will take noticeably more disk space than the original HEIC files — that is simply the price of lossless quality. If you only need small, shareable copies and do not require transparency or pixel-perfect fidelity, our HEIC to JPG tool will give you much smaller files instead.