About

HEIC is the default photo format on iPhones and many other phones, yet it is awkward everywhere else: most browsers will not display it, plenty of apps and upload forms reject it, and its metadata can reveal more than people expect. heic.fyi exists to make the whole life of a HEIC file straightforward — opening it, converting it, understanding it, shrinking it, cleaning it and, when something is wrong, working out why.

Who is behind it

heic.fyi is built and maintained by the heic.fyi team. You can reach us at hello@heic.fyi for questions, bug reports, corrections or security reports — see the contact page for what helps us most.

What we hold ourselves to

• Your files stay on your device. Every tool decodes, converts and inspects in your browser. Nothing you open is uploaded, and there are no accounts.
• We say what a tool cannot do. Every tool page has a section on its limits. If a result is lossy, or metadata is dropped, or a browser cannot do something, the page says so.
• Outputs are checked. Each file a tool produces is re-opened and validated before it is offered for download.
• Claims come with evidence. Technical statements are checked against primary sources and tested on real files; see the editorial policy and the sources we cite.

How to check the privacy claim yourself

You do not have to take our word for it:

1. Open your browser's developer tools and switch to the Network tab.
2. Convert or inspect a file with any tool.
3. Watch the requests. You will see the site's own scripts and WebAssembly files load and, separately, anonymous Google Analytics page-view requests. You will not see your file or its contents leave the page.

The privacy page lists exactly what analytics does and does not receive, and the security page describes how untrusted files are handled.

What the platform covers

• Converting HEIC and HEIF to JPG, PNG, WebP, AVIF and PDF, and JPG, PNG and WebP back to HEIC.
• Viewing files in browsers that cannot open HEIC natively.
• Inspecting structure, metadata and embedded data such as thumbnails.
• Compressing, resizing and removing sensitive metadata.
• Diagnosing and recovering files that will not open.
• Guides and troubleshooting for the questions people actually ask about HEIC.

What it is not

heic.fyi is not a photo editor, a cloud service or a backup. Conversion can change or lose data, so keep your originals. Where we have only been able to test a feature with generated files rather than files from a particular camera, the relevant page says so.

Licensing

The codec components bundled with this site (libheif, libde265, kvazaar and libavif) are open-source libraries, some of them under the LGPL. Their licence texts ship with the dependencies and the upstream sources are listed in the project's third-party notices.

HEVC compression, which HEIC is built on, is also covered by third-party patents. Patent licensing is separate from the software licences above.

Stay informed

Material changes to the tools and corrections to our content are recorded, with dates, in the changelog.