HEIC in PDF

Why HEIC needs a converter at all

Every photo an iPhone or iPad takes is saved as HEIC — Apple's implementation of the HEIF container, which packs high-efficiency compression into files roughly half the size of an equivalent JPEG. That is great on the phone and awkward everywhere else: Windows cannot open HEIC without a paid codec, most web upload forms reject it, and Android, Linux, and older macOS versions all stumble over it.

PDF is the format nothing stumbles over. Converting HEIC photos to PDF gives you a document that opens on any device, in any browser, in any email client — and unlike a folder of loose images, a PDF keeps the photos in the order you chose, one per page, ready to print or archive.

What this converter does

A HEIC decoder runs entirely in your browser, so your photos never leave the device.

Live Photos, bursts, and multi-image HEICs

A Live Photo is a still image plus a short video clip; a burst is a stack of near-identical frames. Both can arrive as multi-image HEIC files. This converter takes the key frame — the still your camera app displays — and converts that, so the PDF page matches what you saw when you tapped the shutter.

If you need every frame of a burst, export the frames as JPEGs on the phone first, then use the Image to PDF tool to combine them.

What happens to your metadata

Decoding a HEIC to pixels and re-encoding it as JPEG — which is what embedding in a PDF requires — normally discards the EXIF block entirely. When you turn on 'Keep photo metadata', this converter reads the EXIF item straight out of the HEIC container and splices it back into the embedded JPEG unchanged: camera model, lens, exposure, capture date, and GPS coordinates survive intact.

Leave it off and the photos arrive in the PDF with no metadata at all — the right choice when you are sharing pictures of your home, your kids' school, or anywhere else you would rather not pin to a map.

HEIC to PDF vs. the alternatives