Convert PNG to HEIC
HEIC was designed for one thing — photographs coming off a phone camera — and it is very good at it. Whether this conversion helps you depends almost entirely on whether your PNG is a photograph, and most PNGs are not.
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What it does
- Large size reduction on photographic content
- Transparency is preserved, unlike most photo formats
- Native in the iOS and macOS Photos library
- No watermark and no sign-up
How to use PNG to HEIC
- 1
Add the PNG
A photograph exported as PNG, a scan, or anything continuous-tone. Files with transparency are fine — this is one of the few photo formats that keeps it.
- 2
Convert
The pixels are re-encoded as HEVC inside a HEIF container on our server. No browser can write HEIC, so this half cannot happen in the tab.
- 3
Confirm the destination reads it
Apple devices, Windows with the HEVC extensions installed, and recent Android. Browsers do not. If the file is going onto a web page, this is the wrong target and AVIF or WebP is the right one.
How it works
The PNG is decoded to raw pixels and re-encoded as an HEVC still frame inside a
HEIF container, which is what a .heic file is. The alpha channel is carried
across as an auxiliary image rather than being flattened away.
ImageMagick does the encoding here rather than sharp. Both report HEIF support, but sharp bundles its own build of libheif compiled without the HEVC encoder, so asking it for HEIC produces AVIF — a different format in the same container, which verifies as valid right up until the receiving device rejects it.
The question that decides everything
Is the image a photograph?
PNG is a lossless format, so it is used for two completely different kinds of picture: photographs that someone wanted kept exactly, and flat graphics — screenshots, diagrams, logos, exported UI — where PNG is simply the correct format and always will be.
HEVC compresses by predicting each block of pixels from its neighbors and storing the difference. Photographs are full of gentle gradients, so the prediction is good and the differences are tiny. Flat graphics are full of hard edges between areas of solid color, where the prediction fails at exactly the places your eye is most sensitive.
That is the whole test. A photograph converts brilliantly and a screenshot converts badly, and no quality setting changes which of those is true.
What you give up
Exactness. A PNG can be edited, saved and re-saved indefinitely with no degradation. A HEIC cannot; every save costs a little.
Reach. PNG opens on literally everything. HEIC opens on Apple devices, on Windows with an extra purchase, and nowhere on the web.
Simplicity. Anyone you send it to may need to convert it back before they can use it, and converting back does not restore what was discarded.
The case where it is clearly right
You have photographs sitting in PNG — often exported that way by a tool that defaulted to it — and they are going into an iPhone or Mac photo library where everything else is already HEIC. The library reads them natively, they take a fraction of the storage, and any transparency survives.
Outside that case, the honest answer is usually that the file should stay as PNG, or become AVIF if size is the problem and the web is the destination.
Examples
A photograph exported as PNG
Twenty-two times smaller with the transparency still there. That figure is measured, and it is the case this conversion exists for — a continuous-tone image that was in a lossless format for no particular reason.
A screenshot of an application window
Technically fine and practically a mistake. The size drops, but the letter edges pick up the soft halo that lossy compression always leaves on sharp transitions, and a screenshot exists to be read. Keep screenshots as PNG.
Frequently asked questions
Does HEIC keep transparency?
Yes, and this is unusual enough to be worth stating plainly. Most formats built for photographs — JPEG above all — have no alpha channel at all, so converting a transparent PNG to one fills the transparency with a color permanently. HEIC carries the alpha channel through, so a logo or a cut-out subject arrives with its edges intact.
Is this conversion lossy?
Yes. PNG stores exact pixel values and HEIC does not, so the image is re-encoded and some information is discarded — the whole reason the file gets so much smaller. On a photograph the difference is invisible at normal viewing sizes. On flat color, text or line art it is visible immediately, and it cannot be undone by converting back.
Will the file open on Windows or in a browser?
On Windows, only with the HEVC Video Extensions installed from the Microsoft Store, which is a paid item on most machines. In a browser, no — no major browser decodes HEIC and none has announced plans to, because the underlying codec carries patent licensing that browser vendors declined to take on. That single fact rules HEIC out for anything web-facing.
What should I use instead for the web?
AVIF or WebP. Both are royalty-free, both display in every current browser, and AVIF is built on the same generation of compression technology as HEIC so the file sizes come out broadly comparable. HEIC is the right target only when the destination is an Apple photo library or a device you know reads it.
Further reading
- Cutting a Graphic to Sixteen Colors Saved Fourteen Per CentReducing the palette is standard advice for shrinking a PNG, and on a graphic that is already flat color it buys far less than the drastic-sounding change suggests. The reason is that PNG was already exploiting the same redundancy, and it had got there first.
- A PNG Logo Wins Up to 128 Pixels, and the SVG Wins Everywhere AboveA vector file costs the same whatever size it is drawn at, and a raster costs what its grid costs — so there is a size where one overtakes the other. On a logo it arrives sooner than most people assume, and the file-size argument is the least important half of the decision anyway.
- Why HEIC Photos Fail to Open, and What to Convert Them ToHEIC is not a damaged version of JPEG. It is a newer image container with a more efficient codec, and the reason it fails is usually the software around the photo rather than the photo itself. The right conversion depends on what needs to open it next.