You take photos on an iPhone, the file extension is .heic, and now you need to send them as a PDF to a teacher, recruiter, or government portal that won’t accept HEIC. The first three “solutions” you find online either ask you to install yet another app, email the photos to yourself, or upload them to a third-party server you don’t fully trust.
There’s a better way: convert them inside the browser tab you already have open. Nothing uploads, no app to install, works on iPhone Safari and on any laptop you happen to be using.
Why a browser-side converter is the right tool
HEIC is decoded with libheif — the same C library Apple itself ships — compiled to WebAssembly. That means the heavy lifting (turning HEIC pixels into a JPEG frame) happens in your browser tab, not on someone else’s server. From the network’s perspective, you visited a static webpage; the photo never left your device.
If you’re handling photos of an ID card, a child’s school document, or a medical bill, this matters. Most other “HEIC to PDF” converters POST your file to their backend, process it there, and promise to delete it within an hour. The promise is fine; the architecture is the issue.
The three-step convert
- Open HEIC to PDF in your browser (mobile Safari or any desktop browser works).
- Drop or pick up to 30
.heicfiles. Drag to reorder if you want a specific page order. Pick page size (A4, Letter, or Auto-match the image), orientation, margin, and JPEG quality (default 92 is a good middle ground between size and clarity). - Tap Create PDF. The download appears immediately.
You can do this entire flow on the iPhone itself — pick photos directly from the Photos app via the file picker, get a PDF back, share via AirDrop, Mail, or upload to the portal that wouldn’t take HEIC in the first place.
Common gotchas
- “My HEIC is huge” — iPhone often saves photos at 12 MP. If you only need it readable (not for print), drop JPEG quality to 75-80% and page size to A4. A 5 MB original can end up as a 400 KB PDF page.
- “Order keeps switching” — file pickers don’t guarantee the order they hand files back. Always reorder explicitly via drag-and-drop after import.
- “Live Photos” — only the still frame is converted. The motion data is ignored.
- Live HDR photos — the converter uses the SDR primary frame. If you need the HDR depth preserved, export from Photos as JPEG XL first.
When NOT to use this
If you need to edit text inside the photos (e.g., scanned receipts), convert HEIC to PDF first, then run OCR PDF on the result to get a searchable, copyable layer. The OCR engine also runs in your browser.
If you’re handling a scanned multi-page document where each page is a separate HEIC (photographed from above), use Scan to PDF instead — it auto-detects edges and applies perspective correction per page.
For everything else — birthday photos, ID copies, receipts you’re sending to accounting — HEIC to PDF is a 10-second job that doesn’t need to involve your inbox.
Use HEIC to PDF: Convert iPhone HEIC photos to PDF. No signup, nothing uploaded.
Frequently asked questions
Since iOS 11 (2017), iPhones default to HEIC because it stores roughly the same image quality in about half the file size of JPG. The trade-off is that older Windows machines, some printers, and many web tools can't open HEIC directly without converting it first. You can change this in Settings → Camera → Formats → Most Compatible, but that means every photo from then on is JPG.
Yes. Select up to 30 HEIC files at once in the dropzone, reorder them by dragging, and the converter merges them into a single PDF in the order shown. Each photo becomes one page.
No — the conversion turns each HEIC photo into a JPEG frame embedded in the PDF, which strips EXIF by default. For most uses (sharing photos as a single document, printing) this is what you want. If you need EXIF preserved, keep the original HEIC files separately.
No. The HEIC decoder (libheif compiled to WebAssembly) and pdf-lib both run inside your browser tab. The file is read into memory, processed locally, and the resulting PDF is generated on your device. Network is only used to load the page itself the first time.
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