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Share Converted Images Without Uploading to Google Drive or Dropbox

Here’s a workflow I used to do at least twice a week: convert a HEIC photo to JPG, save it, open Google Drive, upload it, click Share, copy the link, paste it into an email. Seven steps. For one photo.

It got old fast, especially when I was sending inspection photos to clients who needed JPGs they could actually open on their work PCs. I’d convert a batch of ten, ZIP them, upload the ZIP to Drive, share the link, and then remember to go delete it a week later because I didn’t want random client photos sitting in my Drive forever.

So when we were building out Pro features for heic.site, a share button felt obvious.

How it works

After converting your files, there’s a “Share files” section at the bottom. You can:

  1. Just get a link — click “Get Link” and we generate a URL like heic.site/share/abc123. Send that link however you want — text, Slack, email, carrier pigeon. Anyone with the link can download the files.

  2. Email it directly — type in an email address and we’ll send them a nice download page link. They don’t need an account.

Either way, the recipient gets a page listing every file with individual download buttons plus a “Download All as ZIP” option if there are multiple files.

You pick when it disappears

When you share, you choose an expiry: 24 hours, 36 hours, or 72 hours. After that, we hard-delete everything from our servers. Not soft-delete, not “moved to trash,” not “archived.” The files are gone. The R2 objects get removed, the database records get wiped, and the share link returns a clean “expired” page.

I’m pretty particular about this because the whole point of heic.site is that your files are private. The sharing feature is the one place where files briefly touch our infrastructure, so we wanted the tightest possible window.

For most use cases, 24 hours is plenty. You share the link, the person downloads it, done. If you’re coordinating across time zones or dealing with someone who checks email once a day, bump it to 72 hours.

Why not just use Google Drive?

You absolutely can. Google Drive, Dropbox, iCloud sharing — they all work fine. But they come with baggage:

Account lock-in. The recipient might need a Google account to download from Drive (depending on your sharing settings). With heic.site share links, there’s no login required. Click the link, hit download.

Files stick around. Unless you remember to go clean up, your shared files live in your cloud storage indefinitely. I’ve got a Dropbox full of random screenshots and converted photos I shared two years ago and never deleted. With heic.site, cleanup is automatic.

Extra steps. The whole convert → save → upload → share dance. With heic.site, you convert and share in the same place. Two clicks after conversion instead of seven.

Privacy. Google scans Drive files for their ad profile. Dropbox has had security breaches. We delete your files within 72 hours max and don’t look at them in between.

What about email attachments?

Email works until it doesn’t. Most email providers cap attachments at 25 MB, and if you’re converting a batch of 8-megapixel photos, you’ll blow past that fast. Even if the total size fits, some corporate email servers strip or block large attachments silently.

A share link sidesteps all of that. The email just contains a lightweight link — the heavy files live on our CDN until the recipient downloads them.

The technical bits

When you click “Get Link,” your browser uploads the converted files to our servers through the API. We generate a batch ID, store each file under that ID, and return the share page URL.

The share page is server-rendered, so the recipient gets a fast-loading page with file names, sizes, and download buttons. The “Download All as ZIP” button creates the ZIP right in the recipient’s browser — we don’t generate a ZIP on the server.

We run a cleanup job that sweeps expired shares and removes everything. On top of that, if someone happens to hit an expired download link, we immediately delete any leftover objects on the spot. Belt and suspenders.

Who is this for?

People who convert images and then need to hand them off quickly:

  • Photographers sending processed photos to clients who can’t open HEIC or RAW exports
  • Real estate agents sharing property photos as JPGs with listing teams and brokers
  • Small teams that don’t want to manage a shared Drive folder just to pass files around

The sharing feature is part of heic.site Pro. Free users can still convert unlimited files — sharing is the Pro add-on that makes the handoff easy. If you’re converting big batches before sharing, the batch converter pairs well with this. And if your recipients need PDFs instead of images, check out the PDF output feature.

The short version

Convert some images at heic.site, grab a Pro subscription, and share your first batch. The whole flow takes about 15 seconds — roughly how long it used to take me just to find the “Share” button in Google Drive. We wrote up the full Pro feature set in the launch post if you want the details.