Your iPhone Photos Are Hostages. Here's the Ransom.

Apple didn't switch to HEIC because it's better for you. They switched because it cuts storage in half — which lets them sell you a 128GB iPhone instead of a 256GB one at the same price point. HEIC is a terrific format inside the Apple ecosystem. Outside it, it's a walled garden with no exit sign. Every time a HEIC file breaks in Figma, Photoshop, Word, or a client's browser, you're paying the hidden tax of Apple's storage economics. Converting to PNG is how you stop paying it.

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Plomz HEIC to PNG converter with iPhone photos loaded — showing converted PNG files ready for Figma and Photoshop — iPhone HEIC photos converted to PNG — ready for Figma, Photoshop, background removal, and any design workflow that doesn't speak Apple's native format.

The format war you didn't know you were caught in

In 2017, Apple adopted HEIF (High Efficiency Image File Format) as the default capture format for iPhones running iOS 11, using HEVC (H.265) as the underlying codec. The promise was real: HEIC files are typically 40–50% smaller than equivalent-quality JPGs, which matters enormously when you're capturing 48-megapixel RAW photos on a device with limited storage.

The problem is that HEVC is a licensed codec. Every device that decodes HEVC pays licensing fees to a patent pool. Apple, as a major contributor to the HEVC standard, has those fees baked into their hardware. Windows, Linux, web browsers, and most design tools don't — so they either pay per-device licensing costs or skip HEVC support entirely. That's why your HEIC file shows a broken icon in Figma: it's not a bug, it's a business model.

PNG, by contrast, is fully open, patent-free, and has been universally supported since 1996. Converting from HEIC to PNG isn't a quality upgrade — it's an interoperability upgrade. You're trading Apple's efficient-but-locked format for the format that every tool on every platform has supported for three decades.

The color science problem most converters get wrong

Here's the conversion detail that separates good results from subtly wrong ones: iPhones capture in Display P3 wide color gamut by default. P3 covers about 25% more colors than sRGB, particularly in the greens and reds. When you view a P3 photo on your iPhone screen, those vivid sunset oranges and grass greens look exactly as you shot them.

Most conversion tools ignore this entirely. They copy the pixel values from the HEIC and write them into a PNG without converting the color space. The result is a PNG tagged as sRGB but containing P3-encoded values — which means any software that reads color profiles correctly will display the colors as oversaturated and shifted. Photoshop and Chrome will handle it differently from Safari, and your client's browser may show something different from what you approved.

Plomz converts P3 to sRGB during the decode step, producing a PNG with accurate, universally-consistent colors regardless of what software opens it. What you see on your iPhone is what your PNG will look like everywhere — not just on Apple hardware.

PNG vs JPG: the honest comparison for designers

The conversion choice isn't just a format preference — it's a decision about what you're going to do with the file. Here's the framework I use:

Choose PNG when the photo is a design input. If you're going to crop it, composite it, remove its background, adjust levels, or use it as a layer inside a larger design, PNG is correct. Every edit operation on a PNG is mathematically lossless — the pixel values you started with are exactly what you end with. JPG re-compresses on every save, accumulating compression artifacts that degrade edges and make background removal masks ragged.
Choose JPG when the photo is a final output. If you've finished editing and need to email it, upload it to a website, or send it to a client, JPG's compression makes it significantly smaller. A 12MB PNG can become a 1.5MB JPG with no visible quality difference at screen resolution. Use HEIC to JPG for delivery-only files.
PNG is not always "higher quality" than JPG. A PNG converted from a lossy HEIC source is lossless from the moment of conversion forward, but it cannot recover detail that HEIC compression already discarded. The PNG will look identical to the HEIC — no better, no worse — and will stay that way through every subsequent operation you perform on it. That stability is the value, not some mythical quality restoration.

Why the PNG file is so much larger (the real explanation)

A common reaction to HEIC → PNG conversion: "why did my 2MB photo become 18MB?" This surprises people who associate PNG with "efficient." PNG is efficient — for graphics with flat colors, sharp edges, and large uniform regions, like UI screenshots and illustrations. For photographs with complex, noise-filled pixel data, PNG's lossless compression has almost nothing to compress. Every pixel in a photo is slightly different from its neighbors, and PNG can't reduce that.

HEIC, by contrast, uses perceptual compression. It studies how human vision works — we're more sensitive to luminance changes than color changes, more sensitive to changes in flat areas than in textured ones — and discards data our eyes are unlikely to notice. A photo that's "2MB as HEIC" might contain 60MB of raw pixel data with 58MB deemed perceptually irrelevant and discarded. The PNG stores all 60MB.

This is not a problem with the conversion. It's the honest cost of lossless storage. If the file size matters for your use case, convert to JPG for delivery. If you need the pixel stability for editing, accept the larger PNG and let your storage handle it.

When HEIC → PNG is the wrong choice

Not every HEIC file should become a PNG. Some cases where a different conversion or no conversion is the better call:

Posting directly to social media or a website: JPG is universally supported and dramatically smaller. PNG's lossless advantage disappears the moment a platform re-compresses your upload anyway — Instagram, Twitter, and most CMS platforms re-encode images regardless of what format you upload.
Archiving photos long-term: If you just want the photos in a format you can open in 20 years, JPG is a safer archive format because its smaller size means more copies fit in fewer storage locations. HEVC-encoded HEIC files may have unknown decoder support in the future; JPG was standardized in 1992 and will be readable forever.
Professional RAW photography: If you're shooting Apple ProRAW (.DNG), convert to TIFF or keep in DNG format for professional editing pipelines. HEIC to PNG is the right path for standard iPhone photos, not RAW files.

Design tool compatibility: what actually breaks and why

Figma: HEIC fails at import because Figma runs in a browser, and browsers require explicit HEVC codec support. Even Chrome on Windows, which supports HEVC in video, doesn't expose HEIC decoding to web applications. PNG imports perfectly, including transparency from any transparent HEIC source.
Adobe Photoshop: HEIC support exists but requires Camera Raw to be updated to a version that ships HEVC decoding — and this depends on your OS having the HEVC codec installed. On Windows, that requires a paid codec pack unless you're on Windows 11 with the right hardware. PNG works natively in every Photoshop version back to CS2.
Canva: No HEIC support in the upload pipeline as of 2025. PNG uploads and renders without restriction, including transparent PNGs as design elements.
Adobe Illustrator: HEIC as a placed/linked image is unreliable across platforms. PNG as a linked or embedded image works across all versions and platforms, with correct transparency handling.
Microsoft Office (Word, PowerPoint, Excel): HEIC requires the HEVC Video Extensions codec from the Microsoft Store — which costs money and isn't pre-installed. Sending a Word doc with HEIC images to a Windows user without the codec produces broken image placeholders. PNG inserts, scales, and exports correctly in all Office versions from 2007 onward.
Web browsers for <img> tags: Safari supports HEIC natively (Apple's own browser, Apple's own format). Chrome and Firefox do not. If you're building a webpage, using HEIC in an <img> tag will silently fail for roughly 65% of your visitors.

Your photos stay yours — technically, not just legally

Most tools that offer "free" conversion are running a server-side pipeline where your photos are uploaded, stored, analyzed, and potentially used for model training or advertising targeting. The privacy policy is the product in those cases.

Plomz processes files over HTTPS in temporary in-memory storage and deletes them immediately when the conversion completes. No account, no retention, no secondary use. The conversion happens and the server forgets the file existed. This is verifiable: if you upload a file and check back 60 seconds later, it's gone — no persistent URL, no recovery option. That's a design choice that protects photos of your family, your workplace, and anything else you shot on your phone.

Frequently Asked Questions

I converted a HEIC and the colors look slightly different. What happened?

Your original HEIC was likely tagged with Display P3 wide color — the default on iPhones since iPhone 7. If the converter didn't perform a P3 → sRGB transform, the color values are now in a PNG tagged as sRGB but containing P3 data. This produces oversaturated greens and reds on non-Apple displays. Plomz converts the color space during decode, so the PNG will match what you see on your iPhone across all software and platforms.

The PNG is 10x bigger than the HEIC. Is something wrong?

Nothing is wrong. HEIC uses perceptual compression that discards what the eye doesn't notice — it's similar to how MP3 compresses audio by removing frequencies below the threshold of human hearing. PNG stores every pixel exactly. A 3MB HEIC photo might have 50MB of raw pixel data; the PNG stores all 50MB. If size is the priority, convert to JPG instead. If editing stability is the priority, keep the larger PNG.

Can I use the converted PNG to remove the background?

Yes, and PNG is specifically the right format for this. Background removal algorithms produce cleaner alpha channel edges on PNG inputs than on JPG, because JPG's block compression creates color artifacts along edges that the algorithm interprets as partial foreground. Use background removal after converting to PNG for the sharpest masks.

Does HEIC contain metadata like GPS location and camera settings?

Yes — HEIC stores EXIF metadata (GPS coordinates, timestamp, camera model, aperture, shutter speed, ISO). Plomz preserves this EXIF data in the converted PNG, so location and camera information stays intact. If you want to strip this metadata before sharing, use an EXIF removal tool on the PNG after conversion.

Can I batch convert 30+ iPhone photos at once?

You can upload up to 30 HEIC files in a single session and download all converted PNGs as a ZIP. For larger batches, run multiple sessions — the converter doesn't require an account and there's no daily limit.

Does this work from my iPhone without installing anything?

Yes. Open Plomz in Safari or Chrome on your iPhone, tap "Choose files," select photos from your camera roll, and download the PNGs directly to your Files app. No app install, no sign-in, no redirect to the App Store.

What about Live Photos and HEIC sequences?

Live Photos export as a HEIC still plus a separate MOV video clip. The HEIC component — the still frame — converts normally to PNG. The MOV component is a separate file and isn't part of this conversion. HEIF image sequences (.heifs) are supported as input and are converted frame-by-frame.