Vertimo / Convert / HEIC to PNG

Convert HEIC to PNG on a Mac

HEIC is what your iPhone hands you by default, and it is wonderfully compact, but that compactness gets in the way the moment you try to actually work with the photo. Drop a .heic into an older copy of Photoshop, a Windows machine missing the HEIF extension, or a CMS that has never heard of the format, and you hit a wall. PNG is the opposite kind of file: a lossless, open, universally understood raster format that every editor, browser, and design canvas opens without a second thought. Converting HEIC to PNG turns a closed, phone-native capture into a clean source asset you can paste anywhere.

Vertimo runs this conversion natively on macOS, where Apple's own ImageIO already understands HEIC end to end, so there is no separate HEIF codec to hunt down and install. The HEIC-to-PNG path is lossless: every pixel that came off the sensor lands in the PNG unchanged, with no recompression softening text edges or fine detail. The honest tradeoff is size, since a 3 MB HEIC commonly expands to a 10 to 15 MB PNG, but that is the price of a master asset you can crop, composite, and re-export from forever. Point Vertimo at one photo or a whole camera roll, and each PNG is written right beside the HEIC it came from.

How to convert HEIC to PNG on a Mac

Open Vertimo on your Mac and drag in your HEIC files, whether that is a single screenshot or a full export from Photos.
Choose PNG as the target. Vertimo recognizes the HEIC source and decodes it through macOS ImageIO, pixel for pixel.
Press Convert. Each PNG lands in the same folder as its original, named to match, so nothing scatters across your disk.
Drop the new PNGs straight into Photoshop, Figma, a slide deck, or a web build, no plugin or codec install required.

Why PNG is the right home for an iPhone photo

The trouble with HEIC is not its quality, which is excellent, but its reach. Support across editing tools is patchy and version-dependent: Photoshop on Windows needs the HEIF and HEVC extensions installed before it will even open the file, older releases choke regardless, and plenty of design pipelines, ticketing systems, and content tools simply reject the extension. Even where a tool nominally accepts HEIC, it often transcodes the image behind the scenes on its own terms.

PNG sidesteps all of that. It is lossless, so it is the format you want when you are doing pixel-perfect retouching, pulling a crisp iPhone screenshot into a Figma frame, attaching a bug repro that has to render identically for every reviewer, or compositing a shot where JPG's baked-in softness would show. You convert once, get a faithful master, and never think about codec gaps again.

Lossless decode: the PNG carries the same pixels as the original capture, with no generational compression added.
Universal: Photoshop, Figma, Sketch, GIMP, browsers, and slide tools open PNG with zero setup.
Edit-ready: a flat, predictable source asset you can crop, mask, and re-export without surprises.

Converting on-device, the whole time

Because Vertimo is a sandboxed Mac App Store app that does all its decoding and encoding in your own machine's memory, your photos never leave the Mac. There is no server round trip, no sign-up, and no dependency on a connection at all, which matters when the HEIC in question is a screenshot of something private or a client shoot you are not free to scatter across third-party servers. Tools like CloudConvert and Convertio take a different route entirely, copying your file up to their infrastructure, transcoding it remotely, and streaming a result back down.

Color profiles and the orientation and capture details baked into the original travel into the PNG where the format can carry them, so a converted image still presents the way the camera intended rather than arriving stripped or rotated. The engine's release test suite drives real HEIC samples through this exact path and checks the output, so the fidelity is something we measure on every build rather than something we hope holds.

Vertimo converts HEIC to PNG and dozens of other formats, entirely on your Mac. No upload, no account.

See how Vertimo works →

Questions

Does converting HEIC to PNG lose any image quality?

No. This path is fully lossless. Vertimo reads the HEIC through macOS ImageIO and writes the same pixels into the PNG with no requantization or re-compression, so a converted PNG is a faithful master, not a degraded copy. The only thing that changes is file size, which goes up because PNG does not throw away data the way HEIC's compression does. Color information and the capture details that PNG can hold come across as well, and the conversion is exercised against sample HEICs in our test suite before each release.

Can I try it for free, and does it need an internet connection?

Yes on both counts. Your first batch of conversions is free with no credit card, and everything runs locally on your Mac, so the app works the same whether you are online or completely disconnected. Nothing about your photos is sent anywhere. When you want to keep going, Vertimo Lifetime is a single $34.99 purchase, or Vertimo Pro is $24.99 a year with a free trial.

Why is the resulting PNG so much bigger than the HEIC?

That is expected and is the point of the format. HEIC squeezes images hard, while PNG stores them losslessly, so a 3 MB HEIC commonly becomes a 10 to 15 MB PNG. You are trading compact storage for an uncompressed, edit-ready source asset. If small files matter more than a lossless master, converting HEIC to JPG is the leaner alternative.