HEIC to PDF

Convert your HEIC files to PDF, right here in your browser.

Free
Private
No limits
No upload

... or drop files here

Files never leave your device

Add a HEIC file to convert.

Frequently asked questions

What is actually inside a HEIC file?

A .heic file wraps HEVC-compressed image data in a container that can also hold depth maps, bursts and live-photo frames.

Are my files uploaded to a server?

No. Your HEIC file is read and the PDF is built entirely inside your browser, so nothing ever leaves your device.

Can I convert several files at once?

Yes. Add as many HEIC files as you like and download the PDFs one by one, or all together as a ZIP archive.

Will the layout look exactly like the original?

The text, headings, lists and tables carry over and are laid out onto clean A4 pages. This is a content-faithful conversion rather than a pixel-perfect copy of the original formatting.

Is there a file size or file count limit?

No. Everything runs on your own device, so the only practical limit is how much memory your browser has available.

Do I need to install anything?

No. There is nothing to install and no account to create — the converter runs in any modern browser, on desktop and mobile alike.

Why can't Windows open my iPhone photos?

Because they are HEIC, which uses the HEVC codec, and HEVC is patent-encumbered — Microsoft charges for the extension that decodes it, and most software outside Apple's ecosystem simply does not include it. The format is technically excellent and commercially awkward, which is why converting is so often necessary.

How does this work if my browser can't display HEIC?

It carries its own decoder. Where the browser can decode HEIC natively — Safari on Apple hardware, where the system codecs are available — it does. Everywhere else, libheif compiled to WebAssembly decodes the image in the page. That decoder is a few megabytes, so it is downloaded only when a file actually needs it rather than on every visit.

Is any quality lost?

Not by the conversion. The decoded image is embedded losslessly, so the PDF holds exactly what the decoder produced. Whatever compression the phone applied when it took the photograph is already in the file and is not compounded here.

What happens to Live Photos?

You get the still frame. A Live Photo pairs an image with a short video, and a PDF page has no way to hold the video — so the picture converts and the motion does not.

Is my location data included?

No. EXIF metadata, including the GPS coordinates iPhones attach by default, is not carried into the PDF. Since a great deal of what people photograph is documents taken at home, that is usually the outcome you want.

My .heic file won't convert but it opens fine elsewhere. Why?

It is probably not HEIC. iPhones can convert images to JPEG automatically during transfer to a computer, which leaves files whose names and origins suggest HEIC but whose contents are something else. Check the real format, and set the phone's transfer option to "Keep Originals" if you need genuine HEIC files.

HEIC is what an iPhone has produced by default since iOS 11. It stores an image using HEVC — the same codec as 4K video, applied to a single still frame — inside a HEIF container, and the result is roughly half the size of the equivalent JPEG at the same quality, with support for 10-bit colour and multiple images in one file.

It is a genuinely good format that almost nothing outside Apple's ecosystem will open. Send a HEIC to a colleague on Windows and it may not display; upload one to a portal that wants a document and it will very likely be rejected. This is the single most common reason people need to convert one.

The interesting part is how it gets decoded. Safari on Apple hardware can decode HEIC natively because the operating system's codecs are underneath it. No other browser can, because HEVC is patent-encumbered and its licensing has kept it out of Chrome and Firefox. So when there is no native decoder, this tool falls back to libheif compiled to WebAssembly and decodes the image in software, in the page.

How to convert HEIC to PDF

Add your .heic or .heif files
Drop them in or choose them. If you are pulling photos off an iPhone, take care that the transfer did not silently convert them to JPEG on the way — see below.
Convert
The image is decoded, natively where the browser can and through the bundled WebAssembly decoder where it cannot, then embedded into a page sized to the picture. The software decoder is loaded only when it is actually needed, so nobody downloads three megabytes of decoder for a conversion that did not require it.
Download
Save the PDF. The photograph never left your device — which for photographed passports, bank cards and signed documents is generally the whole point.

Two decode paths, one result

Native decoding: On Apple platforms the browser can hand HEIC to the system codecs, so decoding is immediate and costs nothing extra. Safari on macOS and iOS take this path.
WebAssembly fallback: Everywhere else — Chrome, Firefox and Edge on Windows, Linux and Android — HEVC decoding is not available to the browser, so libheif compiled to WebAssembly does the work instead. It is slower and the decoder is a sizeable download, which is why it is fetched only when a file actually needs it.
Why the difference exists: HEVC is covered by patent pools with licensing terms that browser vendors have not taken on. This is a licensing situation rather than a technical one, which is why the format is simultaneously excellent and awkward.

What the conversion does with the image

The decoded picture is composited onto a white background and embedded losslessly, so nothing is degraded by the conversion itself. Any lossy compression happened when the phone wrote the file.

The page is sized to the image at 96 pixels per inch, so a 12-megapixel photograph produces a large page that the picture fills exactly, with no cropping and no margins.

Live Photos convert to their still frame — the short video alongside it has nowhere to go in a PDF. Depth maps, burst sequences and the secondary images a HEIC can carry are likewise reduced to the main picture. EXIF metadata, including the GPS coordinates iPhones record by default, is not carried into the PDF.

The file that is a JPEG wearing a HEIC name

A frequent confusion, worth naming because it looks like a bug. iPhones have a setting under Photos → Transfer to Mac or PC called "Automatic", which converts images to JPEG as they are transferred. People then find files that behave like JPEGs but came from a HEIC library, or the reverse — an image saved with a .heic extension that is not HEIC data at all.

If a file fails here but opens fine in an image viewer, check what it actually is. Set the transfer option to "Keep Originals" if you want genuine HEIC files off the phone. If your goal was only ever a usable image, letting the phone convert on transfer is the easier route.

PDF or JPG?

Convert to PDF when the destination is a document: something to attach to a form, sign, file or print, especially when it is a photograph of a document rather than a photograph as such.

Convert to JPG or PNG when you want a picture other software will open — to edit, to insert into a report, or to upload somewhere with an image field. Those pages give you an image file rather than a document wrapper, and are usually what people actually want when they say they need to "convert HEIC".

About the HEIC format

.heic is the raster image format MPEG introduced in 2015. It is published as an open specification under the name ISO/IEC 23008-12, so a file can be read without the program that wrote it.

A .heic file wraps HEVC-compressed image data in a container that can also hold depth maps, bursts and live-photo frames.

Files like this usually come out of iPhone, iPad, and macOS Photos.

What comes through

every pixel
pixel dimensions
the colour profile

What does not

transparency
EXIF camera data
layer data

Worth knowing

Most browsers still cannot decode HEIC natively, so this tool falls back to a WebAssembly decoder that is downloaded only when a HEIC file is actually opened.

Information