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 your output format, and download the result. No account, no upload, no waiting for a server to process your stuff.

We built this because every other converter wants you to upload your photos to their servers. That felt wrong for personal images — vacation photos, family pictures, screenshots of sensitive documents. So we made the whole thing run locally. Your files literally never leave your device.

How it works under the hood

Most image formats (JPG, PNG, WebP, AVIF, GIF, BMP, TIFF) can be decoded natively by your browser. We hand the file to the browser's built-in image decoder, draw it onto a canvas, and re-encode it in your chosen format. Fast, simple, no external dependencies needed.

HEIC is the tricky one. Most browsers can't decode it natively (Apple's format, Apple's codec). On Safari, we get lucky — Apple baked HEVC support into the OS, so Safari can decode HEIC images using hardware acceleration. Crazy fast. On Chrome, Firefox, and everything else, we use a WebAssembly build of the open-source libheif library. It runs in a background thread (Web Worker) so the page doesn't freeze while it's crunching.

The output encoding (to JPG, PNG, WebP, or AVIF) uses the browser's Canvas API. Everything from file selection to download happens on your machine. Our servers just deliver the webpage.

Privacy

Converting never uploads anything. The conversion code runs entirely in your browser's sandbox, so your images are not transmitted, stored, cached, or logged on our servers — and we could not see them if we wanted to. That holds for one file or five hundred: batch conversion and ZIP downloads are done locally too.

There is exactly one exception, and it only happens if you ask for it. If you use the sharing feature, the converted files you chose to share are uploaded to our storage so the recipient can download them, and are deleted automatically after the expiry you pick — 24, 36, or 72 hours. Nothing is shared unless you deliberately trigger it. Full detail is in our Privacy Policy.

What we do collect

Basic, anonymous conversion stats: what format you converted from and to, file size, how long it took, which browser family you used, and your country. No names, no email addresses, and no IP address is stored against a conversion — which means we genuinely cannot count unique people. We use this to see which formats matter and where the converter is slow.

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

Cookies and tracking

No advertising cookies, no Google Analytics, no Facebook pixel, and nothing that follows you to other sites. We set one cookie, and only once you sign in: the session cookie that keeps you signed in. That is why you have never seen a cookie banner here — a strictly necessary login cookie does not require consent.

We do use privacy-focused site analytics to count page views and referrers. It measures pages, not people, and builds no profile of you.

Get in touch

Found a bug? Have a feature request? Just want to say hi? Email hello@heic.site.