About OpenMyHEIC

What this site is

OpenMyHEIC is a free set of browser-based tools for working with HEIC photos — the format iPhones and iPads use by default since iOS 11. You can convert HEIC to JPG, PNG, PDF, WebP, GIF or BMP, convert whole batches at once, or simply view HEIC files that your computer refuses to open.

What makes it different is where the conversion happens: entirely on your own device. Your photos are decoded and converted by code running inside your browser tab (JavaScript and WebAssembly, based on the open-source libheif project). Nothing is uploaded, so there is no server storing your pictures, no upload wait, and no privacy trade-off. You can load the page, go offline, and it still works.

Who is behind it

OpenMyHEIC is an independent project built and maintained by Carlos Esteban, a web developer and publisher based in Spain, together with a small editorial team. It is not owned by a software corporation and has no app to sell you — the site is sustained by unobtrusive advertising, which is why every tool is free and unlimited.

The project started at home: Carlos's girlfriend shoots everything on her iPhone, while he is an Android user. Every batch of photos she shared arrived as HEIC files that his phone and his PC refused to open. The online fixes he found all meant uploading their personal photos to some unknown server — so he built a converter that never sees your files at all. That principle still drives every tool on this site.

How we keep content accurate

The guides in our blog and resource pages are written and reviewed by the OpenMyHEIC editorial team. Steps are verified on real devices (Windows 10 and 11, macOS, iOS and Android), and articles show the date they were last updated. When Apple or Microsoft change how HEIC behaves, we update the affected guides rather than leaving stale instructions online.

If you spot an error or something that no longer works, please tell us — corrections ship quickly because the site is small and independent.

How the conversion actually works

When you drop a HEIC file on this site, your browser reads it locally with a WebAssembly build of libheif, the open-source library that decodes the HEIF/HEVC data an iPhone writes. The decoded pixels are drawn to an HTML canvas and re-encoded to the format you asked for — JPG, PNG, WebP, GIF, BMP, or assembled into a PDF. All of it happens in the tab, using your own processor.

That design has consequences we would rather state plainly than hide. Converting a very large batch depends on your device's memory, so an old phone will handle fewer photos at once than a desktop. And because the image is re-encoded through a canvas, EXIF metadata — including GPS location — is not carried over. For most people that is a privacy win; if you need the original capture data, keep the HEIC file alongside the converted copy.

For JPG, WebP and PDF you can choose a quality preset before converting. “Balanced” is the default because at that setting the difference from the original is invisible on screen while the file stays small; “Maximum” is there for printing and archiving.

You do not have to take our word for it

Plenty of sites claim your files are private. Here you can check it in about ten seconds, without trusting us at all. Open your browser's developer tools, switch to the Network tab, and convert a photo: you will see no upload request. Or simpler still — load this page, turn off your Wi-Fi, and convert anyway. It works offline, which would be impossible if your photo were travelling to a server.

There is no account to create, no watermark added to your images, no file-size cap, and no limit on how many photos you convert. We have no way to see your pictures, so there is nothing for us to store, sell or leak.

What we cannot do

The honest gap: this site converts from HEIC, not to it. Creating a real HEIC file requires an HEVC encoder, which carries both patent licensing and a heavy download, so no browser tool can genuinely do it today — anything advertising “JPG to HEIC” online is either converting on a server or not producing true HEIC. If you want your iPhone to stop making HEIC files in the first place, the fix is in iOS itself: Settings → Camera → Formats → Most Compatible.

We also do not edit photos. This is a format converter and viewer, not a photo editor, and we would rather do one job properly than add features we cannot maintain.

Contact

Questions, feedback or business inquiries: contact@openmyheic.com. You can also use the details on our contact page. We usually reply within a couple of business days.