How to Convert HEIC to PNG on Mac

PNG keeps every pixel of the photo exactly as it was decoded, opens in practically every editor and design tool, and is accepted where HEIC is not. A HEIC photo has already lost some detail to compression, so converting it to PNG adds no further loss, but it cannot bring back what was dropped.

The price is size: a photo saved as PNG is several times larger than the HEIC or JPG it came from. For everyday sharing, email and uploads, converting HEIC to JPG gives much smaller files.

• Usually worth it: photos you will edit further, photos for a design tool, a game or a presentation that insists on PNG, and forms that accept only PNG.
• Usually not: photos to email, post or upload to a site with a size limit. JPG is far smaller.
• No transparency to gain: a camera photo has no transparent areas, so PNG only adds size.

macOS has several free ways to convert HEIC to PNG: Finder's Convert Image Quick Action, Preview's export, the Photos app's export and the sips command in Terminal.

• Finder: select the photos, Control-click, choose Quick Actions > Convert Image, pick PNG and an image size, and decide whether to Preserve Metadata.
• Preview: open one photo, choose File > Export (File > Export As… in macOS 27) and set Format to PNG. For several photos, open them in one window, select all the thumbnails in the sidebar and export the selection.
• Photos: select the photos, choose File > Export > Export Photos and set Photo Kind to PNG; turn off the location information option to leave out where they were taken.
• Terminal, one photo: sips -s format png photo.heic --out photo.png.
• Terminal, a whole folder: from inside that folder, run mkdir converted && sips -s format png *.HEIC --out converted. The PNGs land in the new converted folder with the same names, and sips prints a harmless warning about the new suffix. Use *.heic if your files end in lowercase.

File Acture's Convert Images turns a batch of HEIC photos into PNG in one run, on your Mac.

Choose PNG under Format. PNG is lossless, so there is no Quality slider to set. Keep metadata is off by default, so camera details and location are not written into the PNG, while color profiles are always kept so colors don't shift. Photos are turned upright using their orientation tag, and each PNG keeps the original file name.

The same tool converts between JPG, PNG, WebP, HEIC and AVIF, and it reads TIFF, GIF and BMP too. HEIC and AVIF appear as output formats when your version of macOS can write them. Files go to Documents › File Acture › Images unless you choose another folder, the originals stay as they were, and nothing is uploaded.

HEIC compresses photos very efficiently by dropping detail the eye barely notices. PNG keeps every pixel, and photographs, with their endless small color changes, compress poorly that way. As a yardstick, we converted three test photos of 8 to 22 megapixels with macOS's own sips: HEIC files of 1.9 to 3.5 MB became PNGs of 12.6 to 30 MB, six to nine times larger, and four to six times the size of the JPGs sips made from the same photos.

So convert to PNG when something needs PNG, not to shrink or protect a photo. If the PNG then has to fit a size limit, Compress Images can reach a target such as 500 KB, but because PNG is lossless, a small target means fewer pixels.

Check pixel size, metadata and what you really need PNG for before you convert a whole library.

• Pixel size: converting does not change it. To make photos smaller for email or the web, resize them in bulk.
• Metadata: by default no camera details or location go into the PNG; the color profile always does.
• Already have PNGs you need as JPG? Convert PNG to JPG in one run.
• Batches: the free version converts up to 5 photos per run, with 3 runs on each Mac; see pricing for Pro.