{"id":6,"date":"2026-05-17T15:30:47","date_gmt":"2026-05-17T15:30:47","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/convert.forethought-studio.com\/heic-to-png\/"},"modified":"2026-06-11T18:10:21","modified_gmt":"2026-06-11T18:10:21","slug":"heic-to-png","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/www.forethought-studio.com\/convert\/heic-to-png\/","title":{"rendered":"Convert HEIC to PNG without uploading your photos"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Most &#8220;free HEIC to PNG converters&#8221; upload your photo to their server first. Yours doesn&#8217;t have to.<\/p>\n<p>Drop a file below. Your browser does the conversion. The photo never leaves your computer. No signup, no upload, no tracking.<\/p>\n<div class=\"dropformat-mount\" data-format=\"heic-to-png\"><div class=\"dropformat-dropzone dft-skeleton\" aria-hidden=\"true\"><p class=\"ec-dropzone-prompt\">Drop a HEIC file here, or <button type=\"button\" class=\"ec-pick-btn\" disabled>choose files<\/button><\/p><p class=\"ec-status\"><\/p><\/div><div class=\"df-loading-overlay\" role=\"status\" aria-live=\"polite\"><span class=\"df-loading-overlay-spinner\" aria-hidden=\"true\"><\/span><span class=\"df-loading-overlay-label\">Loading converter...<\/span><\/div><noscript><p class=\"df-noscript-message\">This converter requires JavaScript in your browser.<\/p><\/noscript><\/div><p class=\"df-heic-privacy-note\">HEIC photos from iPhones and iPads embed GPS coordinates, camera details, and timestamps. DropFormat strips all metadata during conversion. Your output file contains only pixel data.<\/p>\n<h2>Why PNG over JPG<\/h2>\n<p>PNG keeps every pixel exactly as the camera saw it. No compression artifacts, no lossy re-encoding. The file is bigger than JPG for the same image (often a lot bigger), but you get a clean copy you can crop, edit, and re-export without quality loss stacking up.<\/p>\n<p>PNG also keeps transparency. HEIC files from iPhone screenshots, for example, can have transparent regions; JPG would flatten those to white. PNG preserves them.<\/p>\n<h2>Why we don&#8217;t upload your files<\/h2>\n<p>Most &#8220;free online HEIC converters&#8221; run a server that takes your image, converts it, sends it back, and quietly keeps a copy. Or they run it in the browser like we do, but cover the page in tracking pixels that follow you around the web.<\/p>\n<p>We&#8217;re option 3. The library that does the work (libheif, compiled to WebAssembly) runs in this tab. The file bytes never touch our server. We log conversion errors so we can fix bugs, but never the file content, and the IP that hit our error endpoint is SHA-256 hashed before storage.<\/p>\n<h2>Common questions<\/h2>\n<p><strong>Is the conversion really happening in my browser?<\/strong> Yes. Open DevTools, Network tab, drop a file, watch. No request goes out (other than an error-report POST if the conversion fails, and even then we only send the error message, not the file).<\/p>\n<p><strong>Why is the PNG so much bigger than the original HEIC?<\/strong> HEIC is a modern, compressed format. PNG is lossless, which means it stores every pixel without compression. A 2 MB HEIC routinely becomes a 6 to 10 MB PNG. That&#8217;s normal.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Will this preserve transparency?<\/strong> Yes, where the source has any. Most iPhone camera HEIC files are fully opaque, but screenshots and edited images often have alpha channels, and those survive the conversion.<\/p>\n<p><strong>What happens to the EXIF metadata?<\/strong> Re-encoding to PNG drops most of the original HEIC metadata. If you need to keep EXIF intact, this isn&#8217;t the tool yet.<\/p>\n<h2>What is HEIC?<\/h2>\n<p>HEIC (High Efficiency Image Container) is the default photo format on iPhones since iOS 11. It compresses images at roughly half the file size of JPEG while keeping the same visual quality. The tradeoff is compatibility: Windows, many web platforms, and older image editors do not open HEIC without an extra codec.<\/p>\n<h2>What is PNG?<\/h2>\n<p>PNG (Portable Network Graphics) is a lossless image format. Every pixel is stored exactly as captured, with no compression artifacts. PNG also supports transparency (alpha channels), making it the standard format for screenshots, logos, and any image where you need to preserve exact detail or layer the image over other content. The downside is file size: a PNG is typically 3 to 5 times larger than a JPEG of the same image.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Most &#8220;free HEIC to PNG converters&#8221; upload your photo to their server first. Yours doesn&#8217;t have to. Drop a file below. Your browser does the conversion. The photo never leaves your computer. No signup, no upload, no tracking. Why PNG over JPG PNG keeps every pixel exactly as the camera saw it. No compression artifacts, [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":0,"featured_media":0,"parent":0,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-6","page","type-page","status-publish","hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.forethought-studio.com\/convert\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/6","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.forethought-studio.com\/convert\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.forethought-studio.com\/convert\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.forethought-studio.com\/convert\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/www.forethought-studio.com\/convert\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/6\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":145,"href":"https:\/\/www.forethought-studio.com\/convert\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/6\/revisions\/145"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.forethought-studio.com\/convert\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}