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Convert HEIC to PNG

When you need lossless output from a HEIC file, PNG is almost always the right target format. JPEG's DCT-based compression discards information at every save and is a poor fit for images that will be re-edited or that contain sharp graphic elements, whereas PNG uses lossless DEFLATE compression and supports a full alpha transparency channel, which makes it the standard choice for UI screenshots, design assets destined for further editing, images containing text or logo elements, and any photograph that will pass through multiple edit-save cycles where cumulative JPEG artifacts would degrade quality over time. FixTools converts HEIC to PNG entirely in your browser, preserving every pixel exactly as the HEIC decoder produces it with no additional compression loss layered on top of whatever the original HEVC encoding step introduced when the iPhone captured the photo, and it does so without ever uploading your files to a server.

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Lossless PNG output with no quality loss

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Supports alpha transparency channel

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Ideal for design, UI, and print prep work

Image Tool

HEIC to JPG Converter

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When to Choose PNG Over JPEG for HEIC Conversion

PNG, short for Portable Network Graphics, uses lossless compression based on the DEFLATE algorithm, which means every pixel value written into the PNG file is mathematically identical to the pixel value in the source image at the moment of encoding. JPEG uses lossy DCT-based compression that discards fine detail and high-frequency information to achieve much smaller file sizes, and that discard happens at every save operation rather than just the first one. For ordinary photographs captured on an iPhone, the difference is rarely visible at JPEG quality 85 or above and the file size savings of JPEG outweigh the loss. For certain specific use cases, however, lossless output is essential rather than optional. UI screenshots, product mockups with precise corporate brand colors, images containing text or sharp graphic edges, design assets destined for further editing in Photoshop or Figma, and any image that will pass through multiple edit-save cycles all benefit from lossless PNG output because no additional quality degradation accumulates at any editing stage.

HEIC files captured by iPhones contain photographic pixel data encoded using HEVC lossy compression, which means the HEIC itself is not a lossless source. Converting HEIC to PNG does not retroactively make the image lossless in an absolute mathematical sense, because the HEVC encoding step at the moment of capture already discarded some information that no downstream conversion can recover. What the conversion to PNG does accomplish is ensuring that no further loss occurs beyond what the original HEIC encoding introduced. Every pixel that the HEIC decoder produces from the source bitstream is written into the output PNG exactly, with no additional rounding, no JPEG re-compression ringing layered on top, and no quantization noise added at any stage. For iterative editing workflows where an image passes through multiple applications and gets saved repeatedly, this property matters significantly because each save cycle in JPEG introduces a fresh layer of compression artifacts, whereas PNG round-trips through any number of open-edit-save cycles without any degradation accumulating.

PNG files generated from iPhone HEIC sources are typically larger than both the original HEIC and the JPG equivalent of the same photo, and the size increase reflects the lossless nature of the format. A typical 4 MB iPhone HEIC photo converts to roughly 6 to 8 MB JPG at quality 85, but the same photo encoded as PNG is typically 15 to 25 MB depending on the image content. For a 48-megapixel iPhone 15 Pro HEIC shot, the PNG output can easily reach 40 to 60 MB. This file size penalty reflects the fact that PNG must store exact pixel values for every one of the millions of pixels in a smartphone capture, and the DEFLATE compression that PNG uses is very good at compressing areas of flat color, repeating patterns, and sharp transitions, but is far less efficient than HEVC or even JPEG DCT compression at handling the continuous tone variations and natural noise patterns that dominate photographic content from camera sensors.

A useful practical rule for choosing between PNG and JPEG output when converting HEIC is to ask what happens to the file downstream. If the file is going to be opened, viewed, and never edited again, JPEG at quality 85 or 90 is almost always the right answer because the file is much smaller and the perceived quality is identical for an end viewer. If the file is going to be opened, edited, saved, opened again, edited again, and saved repeatedly over the course of a project lifecycle, PNG is the right answer because each of those save cycles in JPEG layers another round of artifacts whereas PNG remains pristine throughout. If the file is destined for a context that demands either transparency or exact pixel reproducibility, such as automated UI testing pipelines where pixel comparisons drive pass-fail decisions, PNG is the only viable target. FixTools supports both output paths so you can match the format to the intended use rather than committing the whole library to one or the other.

PNG specification and lossless compression (W3C)PNG vs JPEG format comparison (MDN)

How to use this tool

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Select PNG as the output format in FixTools Image Format Converter. Upload your HEIC file and convert to lossless PNG. Best for design work, screenshots, and images requiring exact color fidelity.

How It Works

Step-by-step guide to convert heic to png:

1
Open the Image Format Converter
Navigate to fixtools.io and open the Image Format Converter tool from the image tools menu. This is the right tool for HEIC to PNG conversion because it exposes the full format dropdown rather than defaulting to JPEG output. The page loads its WebAssembly decoder and PNG encoder along with the static page assets on first visit and caches them for instant load on subsequent visits.
2
Upload your HEIC file
Click the Upload control or drag HEIC and HEIF files directly onto the upload area from Finder, File Explorer, an email attachment, or a cloud sync folder. Multiple files are supported for batch HEIC to PNG conversion in a single run, and the converter accepts both .heic and .heif extensions interchangeably since the underlying container format is identical.
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Select PNG as output format
Use the output format selector and choose PNG from the dropdown list. No quality factor setting appears for PNG because the format is lossless by definition and always outputs at full pixel fidelity. The only PNG-specific control is the optional compression level, which affects encoding speed and file size but not visual quality, and FixTools defaults this to a sensible balance for all standard workflows.
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Convert and download
Click the Convert button to start processing. Each HEIC file is decoded to a raw pixel buffer and then encoded as a lossless PNG using the standard DEFLATE compression algorithm. Download the resulting PNG files individually or as a ZIP archive. PNG is universally supported across every modern operating system, every browser, and every image-aware application, so the downloaded files open natively everywhere without any compatibility friction.

Real-world examples

Common situations where this approach makes a real difference:

UI designer working with iPhone screenshots

A senior UX designer at a small product agency receives a batch of iPhone app screenshots from the lead iOS developer as HEIC files, intended for placement directly into a Figma redesign mockup that the design team will iterate on for the next two weeks. The screenshots contain precise UI elements, including small body text, icon sets, and sharp edges around navigation chrome, that must be placed exactly into the Figma frames without any compression-induced blur or fringing. Converting to JPEG would introduce visible ringing artifacts around the text edges and icons. Converting the same files to PNG using FixTools preserves pixel-exact sharpness through every subsequent edit cycle, and the resulting PNG files average roughly 3.8 MB each, about six times larger than the HEIC source but completely lossless.

Product photographer delivering to e-commerce

A product photographer specializing in small jewelry shoots a new seasonal collection of hand-forged earrings and pendants on an iPhone 15 Pro using a small light tent against a pure white sweep background. The e-commerce client needs PNG files with a perfectly clean white background suitable for placement on their store catalog pages where the white must match the surrounding page background exactly. Converting HEIC to PNG using FixTools ensures the background stays at exact white at the RGB value 255,255,255 across every pixel of the sweep, with no JPEG compression ringing artifacts creating a faintly grey halo around the jewelry edges. Each 48-megapixel iPhone source converts to a PNG of approximately 22 MB at full resolution for the catalog upload.

Graphic designer reusing iPhone photo in print layout

A graphic designer working on a brand identity refresh is placing an iPhone hero photograph into an Adobe InDesign layout that will go through at least four scheduled rounds of stakeholder review, with significant edits expected between each round and a final print delivery to a high-end offset press at the end of the project. Rather than starting from a lossy JPG copy of the HEIC source, the designer converts the HEIC to PNG using FixTools and places the lossless PNG in InDesign. This guarantees that no cumulative JPEG re-compression degrades the image quality through the review cycles, and that the final print export reflects the original HEIC pixel quality faithfully without artifacts accumulated through repeated save operations along the way.

Developer testing with reference images

A front-end engineer working on a React component library needs exact pixel-accurate reference images captured from a real iPhone, intended for use in an automated visual regression test suite that runs on every pull request to detect unintended UI changes. The reference images must remain bit-identical across test runs so that the pixel-by-pixel comparison logic produces deterministic pass-fail results without false positives caused by compression noise. Using FixTools to convert HEIC iPhone screenshots to PNG provides genuinely lossless references that compare cleanly across thousands of subsequent test runs, whereas JPEG references would introduce minor encoding variability between machines and over time that could trigger spurious test failures in the continuous integration pipeline.

Pro tips

Get better results with these expert suggestions:

Use PNG for images with text overlay

JPEG compression creates visible ringing artifacts around high-contrast edges, which makes text rendered inside images appear blurry, fringed, or surrounded by faint halos that become especially noticeable on light backgrounds. If your HEIC image contains screenshot text, embedded logos, sharp graphic elements, or any UI chrome at all, convert to PNG using FixTools to preserve clean pixel-perfect edges throughout the file. The substantially larger PNG file size is worth the quality benefit any time text readability or graphic-edge crispness matters more than absolute file weight.

PNG is not always better than JPEG for photos

For pure photographic content without sharp text or graphic overlays, JPEG at quality 85 to 90 percent looks indistinguishable from PNG to the human eye but produces files that are typically three to four times smaller than the equivalent PNG. Use PNG when lossless output is required for the downstream workflow, not as a blanket default for every HEIC conversion you run. Sending a 20 MB PNG photo as an email attachment when an 8 MB JPG would look identical to the recipient wastes bandwidth unnecessarily and risks bouncing off email server attachment size limits that JPG would have cleared.

Check bit depth after HEIC to PNG conversion

iPhone HEIC files captured on iPhone 12 Pro and later models in Dolby Vision HDR mode can encode 10-bit or 12-bit color per channel to support the extended dynamic range that HDR content requires. Standard 8-bit PNG stores only 8 bits per channel, which means the extended HDR information is clipped down to standard dynamic range during the conversion to PNG. If you are working with HDR HEIC content and need to preserve the full extended dynamic range for further HDR editing, convert to a 16-bit TIFF format instead of PNG, since TIFF supports the higher bit depth that PNG cannot.

Use PNG compression level 6 as the standard setting

PNG's DEFLATE compression has nine selectable levels numbered zero through nine, where zero means no compression and the largest possible file size and nine means maximum compression at the cost of slow encoding. Level six is the standard industry default that balances file size against encoding speed for typical workflows, and FixTools uses this level by default for all HEIC to PNG conversions. Bumping the level all the way up to nine typically reduces the output file size by only five to ten percent while taking two to three times longer to encode, so level six remains the right choice for almost every practical workflow.

FAQ

Frequently asked questions

Convert to JPG for photographs you will share, post online, attach to email, upload to social platforms, or use anywhere the file simply needs to be viewed once and never edited again, because JPEG files at quality 85 to 90 percent are roughly three to four times smaller than the PNG equivalent with no visible quality difference for typical viewing. Convert to PNG when you need genuinely lossless output, which includes UI screenshots with embedded text, images containing logos or sharp graphic elements, design assets that will pass through multiple edit-save cycles in Photoshop or Figma, automated visual regression test references that demand pixel-exact comparability, and any image that requires transparency support. PNG is also the right choice for archival workflows where future edit flexibility matters more than disk footprint.

The PNG output is genuinely lossless in the sense that no additional pixel information is discarded during the HEIC to PNG conversion step itself. Every pixel that the HEIC decoder produces from the source bitstream gets written into the output PNG exactly, with no quantization, no DCT rounding, and no compression artifacts introduced by the conversion. The catch is that the HEIC file you started from used HEVC lossy compression at the moment of capture on the iPhone, so some pixel information was discarded at the original encoding step that no downstream conversion can recover. Think of the conversion as producing a perfectly lossless copy of whatever the HEIC source contained, rather than as a way to retroactively recover lossless data from a lossy original.

Yes, almost always, and the size difference is typically dramatic. A standard 12-megapixel iPhone HEIC photo of 3 to 4 MB converts to a PNG of roughly 12 to 20 MB, and a 48-megapixel iPhone 15 Pro HEIC of around 6 MB converts to a PNG that can reach 40 to 60 MB at full resolution. This is expected behavior rather than a tool quirk. HEIC uses HEVC compression that is fundamentally more efficient than PNG's DEFLATE algorithm for continuous-tone photographic content, where the small smooth variations in tone and color across the frame compress well in HEVC but poorly in DEFLATE. PNG's strength is graphics with flat color regions, not photographic content with millions of unique pixel values.

iPhone camera photos are captured as fully opaque RGB images with no alpha channel because the camera sensor records light intensity rather than transparency. Converting such a HEIC to PNG using FixTools produces a fully opaque PNG that matches the HEIC source exactly with no transparency information added. If you subsequently open the converted PNG in a tool like Photoshop, GIMP, or Affinity Photo, you can add an alpha channel through a background removal or masking operation, and saving from that tool will preserve the transparency in the resulting PNG. FixTools faithfully converts whatever pixel data the HEIC source contains and PNG can carry alpha information if it is present, but the iPhone camera never puts any there.

Yes, the converter runs the same way on iPhone Safari as it does on a desktop browser. Open FixTools in Safari on the iPhone, navigate to the Image Format Converter tool, upload the HEIC file from your Photos library through the iOS share sheet, select PNG as the output format, and tap Convert. The resulting PNG downloads to your iPhone Files app from where you can share or save it to Photos. Be aware that PNG files generated from typical 12-megapixel iPhone photos run 12 to 18 MB each compared to 4 to 6 MB for the JPG equivalent, so ensure you have sufficient free storage on the device and factor the file size into any subsequent sharing plan since some apps cap attachment size.

PNG provides lossless archival storage at significantly higher file size, while HEIC provides lossy but much more space-efficient storage. For long-term photo archiving on Apple devices with substantial available storage, HEIC is actually an excellent choice because it offers high perceptual quality at roughly half the disk footprint of equivalent JPG, and Apple's ecosystem will continue to support HEIC for the foreseeable future. If you are archiving to a platform whose future HEIC support is uncertain, such as a long-term backup destination that needs to remain readable in twenty years, TIFF with lossless compression or high-quality JPEG at quality 92 are both more universally archivable formats for photographs than PNG, which is overkill for photography and large for what it provides.

The practical PNG file size ceiling is determined by browser memory constraints rather than by any artificial limit in the converter. A 48-megapixel iPhone 15 Pro HEIC photo produces a PNG output of roughly 40 to 60 MB at full resolution, and most modern desktop browsers handle individual files of that size without difficulty. On mobile devices the browser memory budget is tighter, typically a few hundred megabytes per tab on iOS Safari and similar on Android Chrome, and very large PNG outputs can occasionally trigger out-of-memory errors during the encode step that cause the browser tab to reload itself. For very high-megapixel photos being converted to PNG, a desktop browser with ample RAM is recommended rather than a phone or tablet.

The HEIC decode step takes the same amount of time regardless of the output format because the same HEVC decoder produces the same raw pixel buffer in both cases. The difference appears in the encode step. JPEG encoding using libjpeg is highly optimized and runs quickly because it uses a single-pass DCT and quantization pipeline. PNG encoding using DEFLATE requires multiple passes over the pixel data to build the compressed bitstream efficiently, and the resulting file is much larger which means the browser also takes longer to write the bytes to disk and assemble the final download. Net per-file conversion time for HEIC to PNG is typically two to four times longer than for HEIC to JPG at quality 85.

Yes, FixTools writes the EXIF metadata block from the source HEIC into the output PNG using the standard eXIf chunk that the PNG specification defines for embedded EXIF data. That means GPS coordinates, capture timestamp, iPhone model, lens focal length, aperture, shutter speed, ISO, and orientation flags all carry across from the HEIC source to the PNG output. Be aware that PNG EXIF support varies in older third-party tools because the eXIf chunk was added to the PNG specification only in 2017 and some legacy software predates that revision, so very old image viewers may not display EXIF information from PNG files even though the metadata is present. Modern Photos, Lightroom, and Bridge handle it correctly.