Convert HEIC to PNG on a Mac
Drag the HEIC files in, choose PNG and press Export. One thing to know before you do: PNG stores every pixel exactly, so a photograph saved as PNG is usually several times larger than the HEIC it came from. If you are converting a photo for somebody to look at, JPEG is almost always the format you actually want.
macOS 15 or later. Apple silicon Mac. Version 1.1.0, out 11 October 2026. What’s new.
Free, with nothing to unlock and no account.
Something has to open the photo before anything can convert it, and HEIC is the format most browsers cannot open. Safari and the iPhone are the exception rather than the rule. Rather than offer a converter that works for some readers and not others, this page hands the job to the app.
Some of the other jobs do run here in the browser: SVG to PNG, Lossless compression, PNG to WebP, JPEG to WebP, WebP to PNG, PDF to PNG, PNG to ICO, PNG or SVG to ICNS and Bulk resizing.
HEIC to PNG, step by step
- Drag the HEIC files inA single photo or a folder. Nothing is uploaded, so the size of the batch is limited by your Mac rather than by somebody else's server.
- Choose PNG, and check the numbersEach card shows the size the file will end up at. On a photograph you will usually see it go up rather than down, which is PNG working correctly rather than a fault.
- Press ExportIf the numbers put you off, switch the format to JPEG and watch them change. Nothing is written until you press Export, so you can compare the two before deciding.
PNG is not a smaller HEIC, it is an exact one
HEIC throws away detail your eye is unlikely to miss in order to be small. PNG throws away nothing at all, so converting one to the other cannot make the file smaller and will usually make it several times bigger. That is worth saying plainly because most converter sites do not. Where PNG genuinely earns its place is when you need exactness rather than smallness: an image that is going to be edited again, a screenshot with text in it, or anything that needs a transparent background. When PNG is the right answer, the app still works to make it as small as an exact file can be, searching the per row filters rather than assuming one and compressing with libdeflate wound all the way up rather than the setting everything else settles for.
Why not just use a converter website?
Converting a photo to PNG makes it bigger, often by a factor of five or more. That is exactly the sort of file an upload and download round trip handles worst, and exactly the sort of file a free site puts a cap on. You end up doing them in twos.
There is also the small matter of what a photograph is. A converter site sees a file; you see a picture of somebody. Doing it locally means the question of what happens to the copy on their server never comes up.
Questions
Why is my PNG bigger than the HEIC I started with?
Because PNG keeps every pixel exactly as it decoded, and HEIC does not. You are converting from a format designed to be small into one designed to be faithful, so the file grows. This is normal and is not a sign that anything has gone wrong.
Should I use PNG or JPEG for photos?
JPEG, nearly always. PNG is the right choice for screenshots, diagrams, logos and anything needing a transparent background, where its exactness shows. On a photograph it costs a lot of size for a difference you will not see.
Does the photo lose any quality?
No. Going from HEIC to PNG is a lossless step, in the sense that nothing further is thrown away. The detail the HEIC encoder already discarded is gone, but the conversion itself adds no loss of its own.
Can I make the PNG smaller?
A bit, and the app does it automatically: it drops a transparency channel that is not being used, picks the row filters by trying them rather than guessing, and compresses harder than most tools bother to. It cannot make PNG behave like a lossy format, though.
Other things it does
There is a full list on the Images by Edmund product page, along with what else the app does.
Get Images by Edmund.
Free, and it does the other eight jobs too. Two ways to get it when it lands: the Mac App Store, or straight from here.
macOS 15 or later. Apple silicon Mac. Version 1.1.0, out 11 October 2026. What’s new.