PNG to HEIC — read this first
Converting PNG to HEIC means going from a lossless format to a lossy one. For photographs that can be worthwhile. For screenshots, logos and UI graphics it will make them look worse and may not even make them smaller.
Drop PNG files here
lossless WebP keeps graphics crisp and cuts size
Two separate problems with this conversion
First, the technical one. No browser can encode HEIC, because HEVC encoders are patent-licensed and no vendor has shipped one. Every site claiming to do PNG to HEIC in a browser is either uploading your file to a server or not producing HEIC at all. The full explanation, and the methods that do work, are here.
Second, the editorial one. PNG is chosen for a reason, usually transparency, sharp edges or lossless quality. HEIC is lossy. Pushing a logo, a screenshot or a UI mockup through a lossy photographic codec introduces ringing around high-contrast edges and softens small text, which is precisely the damage PNG existed to avoid.
What to do instead, by content type
| Your PNG contains | Best target | Why |
|---|---|---|
| Screenshots, UI, text | Lossless WebP | Same pixels, roughly 25% smaller than PNG |
| Logos, icons, flat colour | SVG if you have the vector, else lossless WebP | Infinite scaling, tiny files |
| Photographs saved as PNG | AVIF or JPG | Enormous savings, no visible loss |
| Graphics with transparency | WebP or AVIF | Both support alpha; JPG does not |
| Print-bound artwork | Keep the PNG | Printers want lossless input |
The tool above writes WebP and AVIF. For screenshots, set quality to 100 and you get WebP's lossless mode — genuinely identical pixels, in a smaller file than the PNG you started with.
If the goal is just a smaller PNG. You do not have to change format at all. Reducing the colour palette to 256 entries with a tool like pngquant often cuts a UI screenshot by 60–70% with no visible difference, and the result is still a PNG that opens everywhere. Resizing helps even more — use the Size dropdown above and keep PNG as the output format.
If you genuinely need HEIC
The realistic use case is putting images into the Apple Photos library on a device where storage is
tight, or matching the format of an existing HEIC collection. On a Mac: open the PNG in Preview,
File → Export, format HEIF. For a folder, select everything in Finder and use
the Convert Image action and pick HEIF. On Windows or Linux, heif-enc input.png -o out.heic
from the libheif tools does the job. Both use properly licensed encoders and neither uploads anything.
Common questions
- Can I convert PNG to HEIC online for free?
- Not without uploading. Browsers have no HEIC encoder, so any web tool producing a genuine HEIC file is running the encode on a server. If privacy matters, use Preview on macOS or libheif locally.
- Will converting PNG to HEIC keep transparency?
- HEIC does support an alpha channel, so in principle yes. Support for transparent HEIC is patchy across viewers, though, and WebP or AVIF are far safer choices for transparent graphics.
- Is HEIC smaller than PNG?
- For photographs, dramatically, often ten times smaller. For screenshots and flat graphics the gap narrows sharply, and a well-optimised PNG can sometimes beat HEIC while staying lossless.
- What is the best format for screenshots?
- Lossless WebP is the best modern answer: identical pixels to PNG in a smaller file. PNG remains the safest if the screenshot has to open in older software or be pasted into arbitrary applications.