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HEIC to WebP
Convert HEIC to WebP Online — Free, No Upload
Turn iPhone HEIC photos into WebP, the format the web actually serves.
About HEIC to WebP
HEIC is what an iPhone writes by default, and almost nothing on the web reads it. WebP is read by every current browser and by most of the software behind them, so this is the conversion that gets a phone photo onto a page. Two things about the mechanics are worth stating plainly. First, no browser decodes HEIC natively, so this page fetches libheif — a 1.4 MB decoder and its WebAssembly binary, once, on your first HEIC, served from this site rather than from a CDN — and decodes with that. It is why the first photo takes noticeably longer than the second. Second, HEIC and WebP are both lossy, so what you get back is a second generation: the HEIC is decoded to pixels and those pixels are compressed again by a different codec. That cannot recover anything the first encode discarded, and it costs a little of its own, most visibly in smooth gradients and skin tones. The quality slider controls the second pass only. Metadata does not survive either — the photo is decoded and re-encoded through the Canvas API, so EXIF, GPS and the capture time are not carried into the WebP, which is often exactly what you want before posting one. If the destination wants JPG instead, the HEIC to JPG page takes the same files. Batch conversion is supported, and nothing is uploaded.
Questions
Why WebP rather than JPG?
Because WebP is meaningfully smaller than JPG at the same quality and is now read by every current browser, which makes it the better target when the photo is headed for a website or a web app. JPG is still the safer choice for anything older — print shops, desktop editors, upload forms with a hardcoded list — and HEIC to JPG is the page for that.
Is this a second generation of loss?
Yes. HEIC is lossy and WebP is lossy, so the photo is decoded from one encoder's decisions and handed to another with a different model of what you will not notice. The result is the damage from both, not the better of the two. Convert once from the original HEIC rather than through an intermediate, and keep the quality high if the photo matters.
Why does the first conversion take a moment to start?
Because no browser can decode HEIC on its own, so the page fetches a decoder — libheif, about 1.4 MB across its loader and its WebAssembly binary, served from this site rather than a content delivery network. It downloads once and your browser caches it; every conversion after that starts immediately. That download is the whole reason a HEIC page feels slower on its first run than any other image page here.
Will the WebP be smaller than the HEIC?
Not necessarily. HEIC is built on the HEVC video codec and is extremely efficient, so a WebP at a comparable quality can land close to it or above it. The size win here is against JPG, not against the HEIC you started with. The page prints the IN and OUT byte totals so you can see what actually happened rather than assuming a saving.
What happens to the photo's metadata and to a Live Photo?
The metadata does not come through: the WebP is written from the decoded pixels, so EXIF, GPS and the camera's own tags are dropped — open the file in the EXIF viewer first if you want to read them. A Live Photo loses its motion for a different reason: the moving half was never in the HEIC at all, it is a separate video file sitting beside it on the phone, and only the still is uploaded here.
Is my file uploaded to a server?
No. Transmute processes everything locally in your browser using JavaScript and WebAssembly. Your files never leave your device — there is no server, no upload, no cloud processing.