Frequently Asked Questions
What is a HEIC file?
HEIC is the photo format your iPhone uses by default. Apple adopted it starting with iOS 11 because it cuts file sizes roughly in half compared to JPEG, which saves a ton of storage. The downside? Windows, many image editors, and a lot of websites still can't open HEIC files natively. That's why people end up needing a converter.
What input formats does heic.site accept?
Pretty much anything image-related. HEIC, AVIF, WebP, PNG, JPG, GIF, BMP, and TIFF. Drop any of these in and convert to your choice of JPG, PNG, WebP, or AVIF. The converter figures out the input format automatically.
Is this actually free? What's the catch?
No catch. It's free because all the heavy lifting happens in your browser, not on our servers. That keeps our hosting costs near zero, so we don't need to charge for basic conversions. No watermarks, no daily limits, no account required.
Do my files get uploaded somewhere?
Nope. Everything runs locally in your browser. Your files never touch our servers — we literally never see them. If you want proof, disconnect your Wi-Fi after the page loads and try converting something. It still works.
Which browsers work?
All modern ones — Chrome, Firefox, Safari, Edge, Opera. Safari on Mac or iPhone is noticeably faster for HEIC files specifically because Apple baked HEVC decoding into the OS. Other browsers use a WebAssembly decoder, which is solid but not as fast. For non-HEIC formats (PNG, JPG, WebP, etc.), speed is about the same across all browsers.
Is there a limit on how many files I can convert?
No hard limit. Drag in as many as you want and they get processed one after another. For big batches, there's a ZIP download button so you don't have to save each file individually. That said, your browser does have finite memory — on an older laptop, doing 50-75 at a time is safer than dumping 500 in at once.
Will converting hurt the image quality?
Depends on what you pick. PNG is completely lossless — pixel-for-pixel identical. JPG, WebP, and AVIF use lossy compression, but at our default settings (92 for JPG, 85 for WebP, 80 for AVIF), you genuinely cannot tell the difference without zooming to 200% and really looking for it. You can drag the quality slider if you want to tweak the balance.
Does this work on phones?
Yeah. The site is responsive, works fine on iOS and Android. Tap the drop zone to open your photo picker. iPhones running Safari are especially fast for HEIC conversion because of the native codec support.
What happens to photo metadata (EXIF, GPS, etc.)?
We strip it by default — that means camera info, GPS coordinates, timestamps, all of it gets removed. This is a privacy choice. If you want to keep that data, flip the toggle in the settings panel before converting. Just know that EXIF support varies by format: JPG and WebP handle it well, PNG and AVIF are more limited.
Why is Safari so much faster for HEIC?
Apple includes a hardware-accelerated HEVC decoder in macOS and iOS. Safari taps into that directly, so it's decoding HEIC images using dedicated silicon instead of software. In our testing it's 17-39x faster than the WebAssembly approach other browsers use. Once the image is decoded, the encoding step (to JPG, PNG, whatever) is the same speed regardless of browser.