HEIC to PNG,
and when you actually want it.

The short version

PNG is lossless. It stores every pixel exactly as it was, with no photographic compression and nothing thrown away. That is a real property with real uses, and it has a price: on the test photo this app is built against, PNG came out at 1186% of the HEIC that went in. Roughly twelve times. A 2 MB photo off your phone lands at about 24 MB.

If you're here because Windows won't open your holiday photos, that price buys you nothing — the pixels JPG discards at quality 0.85 are ones you cannot see, and you'd be paying twelve times over for the privilege of not discarding them. Use JPG instead; it opens everywhere and it's a fifth of a PNG's weight.

If you're here because you have a screenshot, a scan of a document, an image you're about to edit and re-save four times, or something with transparency in it, then PNG is exactly right and the rest of this page explains why.

What twelve times actually looks like

These are measured, not estimated: Chrome, quality 0.85, on the 1440 × 960 test photo this app is built against. Your files will differ; busy photos compress worse than plain ones.

The gap is not PNG being badly made. It is PNG doing a different job. JPG and WebP look at a photograph and decide which detail your eye will not miss, then delete it. PNG refuses to delete anything, and a photograph — thousands of slightly different greens in a hedge, gentle noise across a sky — is the worst possible input for a format that refuses to delete anything. The same PNG encoder applied to a screenshot, which is mostly flat blocks of identical colour, produces a small file. The format isn't heavy; photographs are.

When PNG is genuinely the right answer

• Screenshots, and anything with sharp text or line art. Lossy compression smears the edges where black text meets white background — the artefacts JPG hides well in a hedge are painfully visible around a letter. PNG keeps the edge exact, and compresses flat colour well, so the file is often smaller than the JPG would have been.
• Images you'll edit and re-save repeatedly. Every save of a JPG re-encodes and loses a little more, and the losses compound across a session. PNG re-saves are free of that: the tenth save is identical to the first. Work in PNG, export to JPG once at the end.
• Transparency. HEIC can carry an alpha channel, and PNG supports one. JPG has no alpha channel at all and will flatten what's there. If the image genuinely has transparency you need to keep, PNG is the only one of these three that keeps it.
• An exact pixel-for-pixel copy. Archival work, evidence, a source file for someone else's pipeline, anything where "close enough that you can't see it" isn't the standard. PNG re-compression artefacts don't exist because PNG re-compression doesn't discard anything.

When it isn't

Everything else. Photographs of people, places, food, pets, documents you only need to read rather than archive — for all of these, PNG costs you twelve times the bytes and returns a difference you cannot perceive at any normal viewing size. That's not a marginal call. That's a 24 MB file where 3.4 MB would have been indistinguishable.

It also fails at the practical job most people came for: a 24 MB PNG is too big to email, too big for most upload forms, and slow on a phone. JPG at 168% is the format that opens everywhere and travels. WebP at 155% is a little smaller again, if the files only need to open in software from the last few years.

The honest caveats

• Nothing uploads, and you can check that. The conversion runs in this page on your machine. Press F12, open the Network tab and convert a PNG: no request, no upload. Or turn off your Wi-Fi and convert anyway — it works, because there is nothing on the other end of the wire. That test is explained in full here.
• No cap, no account. There's no server whose bill grows with your batch, so there is no daily limit to enforce. The reason other converters cap you is that their costs scale with your files and ours don't.
• PNG batches are heavy on memory. The limit is your device, not a plan — but twelve times the output size means you reach that limit twelve times sooner. For large PNG batches, save file by file rather than as one zip. The app will warn you before you hit the wall.
• EXIF metadata is dropped — dates, camera model, GPS. The photo is decoded to pixels and re-encoded, and the metadata doesn't come along. This is true of PNG output here exactly as it is of JPG. Rotation is applied, so images come out the right way up.
• Lossless doesn't mean "better". A PNG made from a HEIC is a perfect copy of what the HEIC decoded to — not a recovery of anything the HEIC itself already discarded. HEIC is lossy too. PNG preserves; it cannot restore.

Questions people actually ask

Keep reading

• HEIC to JPG without uploading — the format most people actually want, and how to verify nothing left your device.
• Batch converting hundreds at once — worth reading before you queue up 400 PNGs.
• Free, with no daily cap — and why every other converter has one.

Already have PNGs?

If your files are PNG already and you've decided that was the wrong call for a photo, convert PNG to JPG for a file a fraction of the size that opens everywhere — or convert PNG to WebP to shrink it for the web while keeping any transparency. Both the converter and the compressor run in your browser, nothing uploaded, exactly like this page.