HEIC to WebP
HEIC and WebP are both modern, efficient formats — the difference is that browsers read WebP. This conversion keeps the file small (much smaller than the JPG most people convert to) while making it usable on the web, which is exactly what you want for iPhone photos destined for a website.
HEIC decoding requires Safari; Chrome and Firefox ship no HEIC decoder.
What Each Format Is For
HEIC. HEIC is what an iPhone saves by default. It compresses roughly twice as efficiently as JPG at the same visual quality, which is exactly why it is awkward: outside Apple’s ecosystem, browser and application support is thin, so the file that saved space on the phone is the one that will not open on the recipient’s machine.
WebP. WebP does both: lossy mode typically beats JPG by 25–35% at matched quality, and lossless mode beats PNG by around 25%. It supports alpha in both modes and animation, and is supported by every current browser. It is the default choice for web delivery.
| HEIC | WebP | |
|---|---|---|
| Compression | Lossy | Lossless available |
| Transparency | Yes | Yes |
Transparency Survives
Both formats carry an alpha channel, so transparent regions convert without being flattened onto a background. That makes this a safe conversion for logos, icons and cut-out product photography.
The Conversion Runs in Your Browser
The file is decoded and re-encoded locally through a canvas. Nothing is uploaded, nothing is stored, and the conversion works with the network disconnected. For anything containing personal data — identity documents, medical images, private photographs — that is a meaningfully different risk profile from any server-side converter.
The practical limits are your device's memory on very large images, and the browser's own codec support: it can only encode formats it ships an encoder for, and the tool tells you when it cannot.
Quality Settings
WebP can encode losslessly, so a conversion from a lossless source is exact — every pixel is preserved and re-encoding again later costs nothing.
One-Way Doors
Re-encoding never recovers information. If the target is lossy, keep the original: a WebP converted back to HEIC has the same artefacts as the WebP, in a larger file. Treat converted output as a delivery copy and archive the source.
Sizing Before Compressing
Resizing beats compressing. Halving an image's dimensions removes 75% of its pixels, which no quality setting can match, and a 4000px photo displayed at 800px is wasting 96% of what it downloads.
| Displayed at | Serve (1×) | Serve (2× for retina) |
|---|---|---|
| 400px | 400px | 800px |
| 800px | 800px | 1600px |
| 1200px | 1200px | 2400px |
Quality Settings That Hold Up
| Setting | Looks | Use for |
|---|---|---|
| 95–100 | Indistinguishable, large | Masters and print |
| 80–90 | Very good | Hero images, product photography |
| 70–80 | Good | Most web content |
| 50–70 | Visible artefacts on detail | Thumbnails |
| Below 50 | Obvious | Nothing |
Everything Runs Locally
Conversion and compression here use a canvas in your own tab. No file is uploaded, nothing is stored, and the work continues offline once the page has loaded. That is worth knowing for anything containing faces, documents or unreleased work — most online image tools upload by necessity, because they process server-side.
Getting the Rest of the Win
- Serve modern formats with a fallback.
- Always set
widthandheight. Without them the page reflows on load, which
- Lazy-load below the fold — and never the hero, since
loading="lazy"on it delays
- Strip metadata. EXIF can carry GPS coordinates and adds weight to every copy.