About heic.site

What is heic.site?

A free image converter that runs in your browser. Drop in a HEIC, AVIF, WebP, PNG, JPG, GIF, BMP or TIFF file, pick the format you want out of it, and download the result. There's no account to create and no upload to sit and wait on.

We built it because every other converter wants your photos on its servers first. That never sat right for personal pictures — holiday photos, family snaps, screenshots of documents you'd rather not hand to a stranger. So the whole thing runs locally instead, and your files never leave your device.

How it works under the hood

Most image formats (JPG, PNG, WebP, AVIF, GIF, BMP) can be decoded by your browser already. We hand the file to the built-in decoder, draw it onto a canvas, and re-encode it in the format you asked for. That path is quick and needs nothing extra loaded.

TIFF and HEIC are the two the browser won't help with. Chrome and Firefox refuse TIFF outright, and Safari only manages it by asking macOS to do the work, so most in-browser converters can't open a TIFF at all. This one can, because it ships its own JavaScript TIFF decoder and runs it in a background thread.

HEIC is Apple's format built on Apple's codec, and most browsers can't decode it natively. Safari is the exception. HEVC support is baked into macOS and iOS, so Safari decodes HEIC with hardware acceleration and gets through a batch of iPhone photos noticeably faster than anything else. Chrome, Firefox and the rest use a WebAssembly build of libheif, the open-source decoder, running in a Web Worker so the page doesn't freeze while it works.

Encoding the output uses the browser's Canvas API: JPG, PNG and WebP everywhere, plus AVIF on the browsers that can encode it, which doesn't include Chrome. Everything from picking a file to downloading the result happens on your machine. Our servers only deliver the page.

Privacy

Converting never uploads anything. The conversion code runs inside your browser's sandbox, so your images aren't transmitted, stored, cached or logged by us. That holds however many files you convert — the batching and the ZIP are built locally too. Batch size is capped on the free tier, but that's a plan limit rather than a privacy one. A Pro batch of five hundred files stays on your device exactly like a free batch of three.

There is one exception, and it only happens when you ask for it. Use the sharing feature and the converted files you picked are uploaded to our storage so the recipient can download them, then deleted automatically after the expiry you chose: 24, 36 or 72 hours. Nothing is shared unless you deliberately trigger it. The full detail is in our Privacy Policy.

What we do collect

Anonymous conversion statistics: which format you converted from and to, the file size, how long the job took, your browser family and your country. No filename, no email address and no IP address is stored against a conversion, so a record can't be traced back to whoever made it. We read it to see which formats people actually bring us and where the converter is slow.

If you create an account we also store your email address. Failed sign-in attempts are logged with the IP they came from, for a short window, so that nobody can sit and guess your password indefinitely.

Cookies and tracking

We set one cookie, and only once you sign in: the session cookie that keeps you signed in. There are no advertising cookies here and nothing that follows you to other sites, which is why you have never been shown a cookie banner. A strictly necessary login cookie doesn't require consent.

Page views and referrers are counted by first-party analytics that stores nothing in your browser. It tells a returning visitor from a new one using a hash of your IP address and a salt that rotates daily, which can't be reversed and is never tied to your account or to the conversion statistics above. The Privacy Policy sets out exactly what is recorded.

Get in touch

Bugs, feature requests, or anything else you want to raise: email hello@heic.site.