How to convert HEIC to PNG on Mac (batch, offline, 2026)

The upload form takes “PNG only” and rejects the photo straight off your iPhone. A print-on-demand service, a government portal, an app store listing, a client’s CMS — some destination has drawn a hard line at PNG, and everything your iPhone has shot since 2017 is HEIC, a format half the internet’s upload validators have never heard of. So you’re staring at IMG_4032.HEIC and a red error message.

The fix is a conversion your Mac can do four ways without touching the internet: a Preview export, a Finder right-click, a Terminal one-liner, and a drag-the-folder batch app. This guide covers how to convert HEIC to PNG on a Mac by every route — plus the decision worth making first, because for a lot of people landing on this page, PNG isn’t actually the format they want.

First: is PNG really the right target?

HEIC and PNG sit at opposite ends of the image-format spectrum, and converting between them has a consequence worth knowing before you commit a whole folder to it:

• HEIC is a lossy, aggressively efficient format — it’s how an iPhone fits a 12-megapixel photo into 1–2 MB.
• PNG is a lossless format designed for graphics, screenshots, and transparency — and it stores photographic content very inefficiently. A 2 MB HEIC routinely becomes a 15–25 MB PNG. That’s not a bug; it’s what lossless storage of a photo costs.

So pick PNG when the destination requires it — the portal, the print service, the pipeline that whitelists PNG and nothing else — or when the image is entering an edit loop where PNG’s losslessness stops any further generation loss. Pick JPG instead when the actual goal is just “a photo that opens everywhere”: JPG is equally universal and produces files a tenth the size. If nobody has specifically said “PNG,” the JPG guide is probably the one you want.

Two more things the conversion can’t do, no matter the tool:

1. It can’t restore quality. HEIC is lossy, so the iPhone already discarded some detail at capture. PNG preserves the photo exactly as the HEIC holds it — no further loss, ever, but no recovery either.
2. It can’t create transparency. A photo has no alpha channel to inherit; the PNG simply could hold transparency, it doesn’t gain any. (If you need a subject cut out on a transparent background, macOS’s Remove Background Quick Action in Finder does the removal and outputs PNG in one step.)

Decision made? Here’s every route, lightest to heaviest. All of them run offline.

Skip the converter websites

The arithmetic against “free HEIC to PNG” websites is worse here than for almost any other conversion: you upload personal photos — complete with GPS coordinates and capture times in their EXIF data — to a stranger’s server, then download back files that are ten times larger than what you sent. For camera-roll photos of your family, your home, your documents, keep the whole job on the machine. Every method below does.

Method 1: Preview (one or two photos)

1. Double-click the HEIC — it opens in Preview.
2. Choose File → Export.
3. Set Format to PNG. If PNG isn’t in the list, hold Option while clicking the Format menu to reveal the full set.
4. Click Save.

For a handful of files: open them together in Preview, press ⌘A in the thumbnail sidebar, choose File → Export Selected Images, then click Options to set PNG. Fine for a dozen; tedious beyond that.

Method 2: Finder’s Quick Action (fastest free batch)

1. In Finder, select the HEIC files — or ⌘A on the folder’s contents.
2. Right-click the selection.
3. Choose Quick Actions → Convert Image.
4. Set Format to PNG, pick a size (Actual Size keeps full resolution), and decide whether to keep metadata — for photos leaving your machine, unchecking this strips location data.
5. Click Convert to PNG.

New .png files appear beside the originals, which stay untouched. For the occasional folder this is the best free answer on macOS. Its limits: coarse size choices, no renaming, and no way to mirror a folder tree — everything lands flat, next to the sources.

Method 3: sips in Terminal (scripted batches)

macOS ships sips, a command-line image converter that reads HEIC natively. One file:

sips -s format png IMG_4032.HEIC --out IMG_4032.png

A whole folder:

cd ~/Pictures/to-convert
for f in *.HEIC; do
  [ -e "$f" ] || continue
  sips -s format png "$f" --out "${f%.*}.png"
done

(iPhone files usually arrive with the uppercase .HEIC extension; adjust the glob if yours are lowercase.) There’s no quality flag for PNG output — lossless has no dial. sips is fast, free, and preinstalled, and also unforgiving: no preview, no undo, and a mistyped --out overwrites files. Use it in scripts, not by hand on originals. If automation is the real goal, Zumkor’s “Convert Files” action in Apple’s Shortcuts app does the same job headless — a folder-watch shortcut converts whatever lands in a folder, without the overwrite risk.

Method 4: Zumkor (drag the folder, done)

When HEIC-to-PNG is a recurring chore — weekly asset submissions, a documentation pipeline, a client who always wants camera photos delivered as PNG — this is the workflow Zumkor collapses to one drag (it needs macOS 14 or later on an Apple silicon Mac — any M-series machine):

1. Open Zumkor and drag in the HEIC files — the whole folder, subfolders and all (“Look inside subfolders” picks up nested files), or pull pictures straight from your Photos library without exporting first.
2. Pick PNG as the output format.
3. (Optional) Add a resize preset in the same pass — “Email-friendly” caps the long edge at 1600 px, “Web small” at 1280 px — and flip on the personal-data strip if the photos are headed somewhere public. The “Privacy export” preset does that by default, removing GPS, device serials, and timestamps in the same pass as the conversion.
4. Click Convert and choose the output folder. Originals stay put.

Everything runs on-device and offline — no uploads, no web-tool file caps, and your photos’ location data never leaves the machine. Folder structure can be mirrored in the output, filename templates keep big batches organized, and the queue takes up to 2,000 files. Wide-gamut color survives too: iPhones capture in Display P3, and Zumkor preserves color profiles through the conversion, so reds and greens don’t flatten the way they can in careless converters.

The same drag handles every direction your camera roll produces: Zumkor reads HEIC, JPG, PNG, TIFF, WebP, GIF, BMP, and camera RAW, and writes PNG, JPG, HEIC, TIFF, WebP, and AVIF — so this week’s PNG-only portal and next week’s WebP downloads go through the same app instead of a different trick per format. (And when a WebP save has transparency that needs to reach PNG intact, that trip has its own guide.)

Zumkor is free for 7 days, full-featured; after that it’s a one-time $19.99 purchase — buy once, keep it forever, no subscription. Fair is fair: for one photo, Preview is free and already installed. The app earns its slot at folder scale, on repeat, and when the photos shouldn’t leave your machine.

Getting the output right

• Expect dramatic file growth. A 1.8 MB HEIC becoming an 18 MB PNG is normal. PNG stores photographs losslessly, and photographs are what lossless compression handles worst. If the sizes are a problem and the destination doesn’t strictly demand PNG, that’s your cue to use JPG instead.
• Strip metadata before the files go public. GPS coordinates, capture timestamps, and device identifiers ride inside HEIC files and carry into the PNG unless removed — the Quick Action’s metadata checkbox or Zumkor’s one-click strip handle it. Anything headed to a forum, a listing, or a client deserves this pass.
• Wide-gamut color is worth preserving. iPhone photos use the Display P3 color space. Preview, sips, and Zumkor all keep the embedded profile; if a converted photo suddenly looks flat or oversaturated elsewhere, a converter dropped the profile — reconvert with a tool from this page.
• Live Photos convert as stills. A Live Photo’s HEIC carries the still frame; converting it produces a normal PNG of that frame. The motion part is a separate video file and isn’t part of this conversion.
• Keep the HEIC originals. The PNGs contain no extra detail — they’re bigger, not better. If a destination later wants JPG or the original, you’ll want the HEICs rather than round-tripping a 20 MB PNG.

Stopping the problem at the source (sometimes)

If every photo you shoot needs converting, the iPhone can capture JPG directly: Settings → Camera → Formats → Most Compatible. The trade-off is real — JPG capture roughly doubles per-photo storage versus HEIC and gives up some dynamic-range niceties — and it still doesn’t produce PNG, so for a PNG-only pipeline the conversion step remains either way. Most people are better off leaving the camera on High Efficiency and converting the subset of photos that actually need it, which is exactly the folder-at-a-time job above.

Bottom line

• One or two photos: Preview → File → Export → PNG (hold Option if PNG is hidden). Ten seconds, free.
• A folder, occasionally: Finder → right-click → Quick Actions → Convert Image → PNG — and uncheck metadata for anything leaving your Mac.
• Part of a script: a sips -s format png loop.
• A recurring chore, big batches, Photos-library sources, or metadata stripping in the same pass: Zumkor — drag the folder, pick PNG once, convert offline, one-time $19.99.
• Before any of it: confirm PNG is actually required. If the goal is just compatibility, HEIC to JPG gets you files a tenth the size — PNG’s job is satisfying PNG-only destinations and protecting images entering edit pipelines.

FAQ

How do I convert HEIC to PNG on a Mac without installing anything?

Open the HEIC in Preview, choose File → Export, set Format to PNG (hold Option while clicking the Format menu if PNG is hidden), and save. For several photos at once, select them in Finder, right-click, and choose Quick Actions → Convert Image with PNG as the format. Both are built into macOS and work completely offline.

Does converting HEIC to PNG lose quality?

No. PNG is lossless, so it stores the photo exactly as the HEIC holds it — nothing further is discarded. It also cannot add quality back: HEIC is a lossy format, so whatever the iPhone’s encode discarded at capture time stays gone. Expect the PNG to be dramatically larger, often ten times the HEIC’s size.

Should I convert HEIC to JPG or PNG?

JPG, in most cases. If the goal is simply a photo that opens everywhere, JPG is universally compatible and a fraction of PNG’s size. Choose PNG only when the destination explicitly requires it — an upload portal, a print service, an asset pipeline — or when the image is heading into repeated edit-and-resave rounds where PNG’s losslessness stops further degradation.