Share Converted Images Without Uploading to Google Drive or Dropbox

The workflow I used to run at least twice a week: convert a HEIC photo to JPG, save it, open Google Drive, upload it, click Share, set the permissions, copy the link, paste it into an email. Eight steps to move one photograph from my machine to someone else’s.

The context was inspection photos going out to clients who needed JPGs their work PCs could actually open. Ten or so images per job. Convert them, ZIP the lot, upload the ZIP to Drive, share it, and then set myself a reminder to delete the folder the following week, because I didn’t want other people’s property photos sitting in my Drive indefinitely. Half the time I forgot the reminder. There’s still a Dropbox account of mine holding screenshots I shared a couple of years ago.

That’s the whole reason the share button exists. It’s the feature I built for myself first and then noticed other people wanted.

What it actually does

Convert your files, then look for the share section underneath the results. Clicking through gives you a link like heic.site/share/abc123. Send it by text, by Slack, or however else you talk to people. Alternatively, type in an address and I’ll email the link to the recipient directly.

Whoever opens the link gets a page listing every file with its name and size, a download button beside each one, and a “Download All as ZIP” button if there’s more than one. They don’t need an account or a login of any kind. A share holds up to 10 files or 50 MB, which comfortably covers a job’s worth of photos.

Expiry and deletion

When you create the share, you pick how long it lives: 24 hours, 36, or 72. As soon as that clock runs out the download endpoint refuses access. An hourly cleanup removes the files from R2 and then deletes their database rows. If an R2 deletion fails, the database row is deliberately retained so the next hourly run can retry it instead of losing track of the object.

I’m fussy about this because sharing is the one part of heic.site where your files touch my infrastructure at all, and everything else the site does happens inside your browser without the file ever leaving the machine. Having built the whole thing around that, I wasn’t about to bolt on a feature that quietly kept copies.

Most of the time 24 hours is the right choice. You send the link, they download the files, done. Stretch it to 72 if the recipient checks their email once a day.

Compared with putting it in Drive

Drive and Dropbox work fine for this. I’m not going to pretend otherwise, and if the files are ones you want to keep, a cloud drive is the correct tool.

The differences show up in the small stuff. Depending on how you’ve set permissions, Drive may ask the recipient to sign into a Google account before it hands over a file — and the people who most often need a HEIC converted are exactly the people least likely to have one to hand. Cloud storage also keeps everything until you go back and tidy up, and the account holding your client’s photos is the same account holding your tax documents and your holiday snaps. Then there’s the step count: converting and sharing in the same place is two clicks after the conversion finishes, rather than the eight-step dance I described at the top.

None of that makes Drive wrong. It makes it a poor fit for files whose entire useful lifespan is about a day.

Email attachments run out of road

Most providers cap attachments around 25 MB. A batch of 8-megapixel JPGs gets there quickly. Worse, plenty of corporate mail servers strip or quarantine large attachments without telling anybody. The message looks sent — it turns up with nothing attached.

A link sidesteps that. The email carries a few hundred bytes of URL and the files sit on a CDN until someone actually fetches them.

How it works underneath

Clicking to share uploads the converted files from your browser to the share endpoint. The server assigns a batch ID and returns the share URL. This is the only code path in the product that sends your files anywhere, and it only runs when you deliberately trigger it.

The share page itself is server-rendered, so recipients get file names, sizes and buttons on first paint rather than waiting for JavaScript to fetch a listing. The “Download All as ZIP” button builds the archive in the recipient’s browser, the same way the converter does, which keeps the server out of it.

Cleanup happens twice over. A scheduled job sweeps expired shares and deletes their objects, and separately, anyone hitting an expired link triggers an immediate delete of whatever’s left under that ID. The second one is there because scheduled jobs occasionally don’t run.

Who ends up using it

Mostly people who convert images and then hand them straight to someone else. Photographers sending processed shots to clients whose machines choke on HEIC, and estate agents pushing property photos out to a listing team. Anyone, really, who’d otherwise stand up a shared folder for a handover that lasts an afternoon.

Sharing is part of heic.site Pro, which also removes the three-file batch limit. Free accounts convert as much as they like, three files at a time. If you’re converting a lot before you share, the batch converter is the piece that pairs with it, and if your recipient wants PDFs rather than images, PDF output covers that.

Convert something at heic.site, pick up Pro, and send your first link. It takes roughly fifteen seconds — about how long I used to spend hunting for the Share button in Drive. The launch post has the rest of what Pro includes.