About Heicway

Heicway does one job: convert HEIC photos (and their cousins — HEIF, AVIF, WebP) into formats that open everywhere, entirely inside your browser.

It exists because of a gap between two facts. First, every iPhone shoots HEIC by default, and an enormous amount of everyday software — stock Windows, Chrome, older editors, upload forms — still refuses it. Second, the files involved are photos: faces, homes, children, documents, with GPS coordinates embedded. Exactly the data that should never be shipped to an anonymous “free converter” server to be processed out of sight.

The fix is architectural, not cosmetic. This site is static: there is no upload endpoint, no processing queue, no account system. The HEIC decoder — libheif, the same open-source library desktop software uses — is compiled to WebAssembly and runs in your browser. That’s why the tool works offline, and why the privacy claim can be verified in two minutes rather than taken on faith.

Principles

• Local only. Photos never leave your device. Not “deleted after” — never received.
• Honest about formats. When PNG will balloon your file size or a JPG will flatten transparency, the page says so before you convert.
• Free without a catch. No signup, no watermark, no file caps. Your device does the work, so serving you costs almost nothing.
• No pretending. Live Photo motion, animated files, exotic codecs — where a conversion can’t preserve something, we say it plainly.

Who makes this

Heicway is built and maintained by an independent developer as part of a small family of single-purpose, local-first browser tools. It may eventually show unobtrusive ads to cover its costs — if it does, they will sit outside the tool and will never see your files, because the no-upload architecture doesn’t change with the funding model.

Questions, bug reports, or a format we should handle? Get in touch.