About this site

Why we built it

HEIC is an efficient photo format, but it still causes headaches on Windows, in online forms and when sharing pictures with people outside the Apple ecosystem. Most online converters deal with this by uploading your photos to a server. We wanted converters that get the job done without your pictures ever leaving your device.

How the converters work

When you add a file, the page loads an image decoder compiled to WebAssembly and runs it in a background worker inside your browser. The decoder reads the HEIC, applies the photo's rotation and hands the pixels to your browser's built-in image encoder, which produces the PNG or JPG. The finished file is offered as a download straight from memory, and no server takes part in the conversion.

What you can rely on

Your files are never uploaded. There are no accounts, no sign-up forms and no cookies. We also aim to be clear about what the tools do not do: metadata such as GPS location is not copied into converted files, and when a HEIC contains several images only the primary one is converted.

Open-source software and licences

HEIC decoding is powered by libheif, an open-source HEIF and AVIF library developed by struktur AG and distributed under the GNU Lesser General Public License (LGPL) version 3. Its source code and licence are available from the libheif project at https://github.com/strukturag/libheif.

The converters use libheif through libheif-js, a WebAssembly build of libheif that is also released under the LGPL version 3 and is available at https://github.com/catdad-experiments/libheif-js. We are grateful to the authors of both projects.

Get in touch

Found a photo that will not convert, or need a format we do not support yet? Use the contact page to let us know. Requests from users help decide which converters come next.