Convert HEIC to PNG — Free HEIC to PNG Converter

How to Convert HEIC to PNG

Why Convert HEIC to PNG?

HEIC photos from your iPhone sometimes need to be in PNG format — for design work, presentations, or any situation where you need lossless quality and wide software compatibility. PNG preserves every pixel without compression artifacts, making it ideal for screenshots, graphics, and images that will be edited further.

Unlike JPG, PNG supports transparency. If you plan to remove the background from your photo or layer it over other images, PNG is the right choice. The tradeoff is larger file sizes, but the quality preservation is worth it for editing workflows.

All of it runs on your own device, which matters for personal photos: nothing is uploaded, no cloud service is involved, and nobody's server ever holds a copy. The conversion is free and immediate.

For sharing, where file size matters more than pixel-perfect quality, HEIC to JPG remains the practical choice. Our compressor can then trim the resulting PNG without any quality cost.

Compress your PNG · HEIC to JPG

What changes going from HEIC to PNG

Going to PNG turns a lossy file into a lossless one, and it pays to be clear about what that buys you. The blockiness and smoothing the HEVC encoder introduced on the phone are carried over pixel for pixel; nothing is restored. What you gain is a file that survives any number of further saves without degrading, which makes PNG the right intermediate if the photo is heading into an editor, a background remover or a compositing step.

LeanImg decodes through libheif into 8-bit RGBA, encodes with the jSquash PNG encoder, then runs oxipng at level 3, which only rearranges the deflate stream and never changes a pixel. An alpha plane, if the HEIC has one, is carried straight into the PNG's alpha channel instead of being flattened. PNG can hold 16 bits per channel, but because the decode goes through a browser canvas the output is 8-bit even from a 10-bit heix source, and any HDR gain map is discarded.

Expect a full-resolution iPhone photo to come out several times to well over ten times its original size, because deflate has no model of photographic noise and stores nearly every pixel at close to full cost. EXIF, GPS and the Display P3 profile are dropped; only the pixel grid makes the trip.

Don't do this when the destination is email, a chat app or a website: you would ship a file an order of magnitude bigger with no visible benefit over the JPG or WebP version of the same photo.

HEIC vs PNG

What is a PNG file?

PNG became a W3C Recommendation in October 1996, designed after Unisys began enforcing the LZW patent that GIF relied on. It is lossless and only lossless: one compression method, deflate, applied after per-scanline filters. Every tool advertising a lossy PNG is really quantizing to a 256 color palette before writing an ordinary lossless PNG. Transparency comes in three grades: a real alpha channel at 8 or 16 bits, up to 256 alpha levels from a palette table, or a single keyed color.

How to open a PNG file

Nothing needs installing anywhere: Preview and Quick Look on macOS, Photos and Paint on Windows, and libpng as a base dependency on Linux mean GIMP, Krita and every GTK or Qt application read it. The interesting tools are the optimizers — optipng, oxipng and zopflipng rewrite the file losslessly, and LeanImg's compressor runs oxipng at optimization level 3 without ever changing a pixel.

Convert other formats to PNG

Convert HEIC to other formats

• HEIC to JPG
• HEIC to WebP

Frequently Asked Questions