Convert HEIC photos to TIFF in your browser

A HEIC file holds a photo encoded with the HEVC codec inside a HEIF container, defined in the ISO/IEC 23008-12 standard[1]. The iPhone 7 and later models running iOS 11 or later save photos in this format[2], and since Android 10 in 2019, so do phones with a suitable hardware encoder[1].

TIFF was created at Aldus, which published the first version of the specification in the fall of 1986. The latest version, 6.0, dates from 1992, and Adobe holds the rights to the specification today[3]. MDN describes TIFF as a heavy format, because the files are usually uncompressed or only lightly compressed, and among browsers only Safari displays TIFF images[4].

Among browsers, only Safari 17 and later displays HEIC files[5], and Windows opens them only when two extensions from the Microsoft Store are installed[6]. TIFF is read by the built-in Windows codec[7] and by scanning, photo editing and page layout software[3]. MDN names it a good choice for images intended for print[4].

1. Drag your photos onto the Add files field, or click it and pick files. The converter accepts .heic and .heif files, several at once.
2. Click Convert. Each finished photo shows Done.
3. Save one file with Download or all of them with Download all, which packs several files into a ZIP archive. Only the extension changes, to .tiff.

The queue shows the Before and After weight of each file with the difference in percent and, below the buttons, the totals for the batch.

TIFF has no quality setting because the converter saves it without compression, so the file weight depends only on the pixel dimensions of the photo. Remove takes one photo off the queue, and Clear all empties it.

Everything happens in your browser: its HEVC decoder reads the HEIC photo, and the UTIF.js library, also running in the browser, saves the TIFF.

The converter saves TIFF without compression. Each pixel takes 4 bytes in the file, one each for red, green, blue and transparency, plus 1,000 bytes that describe the file. A 4032 by 3024 pixel photo has 12,192,768 pixels, so as TIFF it weighs 48,772,072 bytes, or 46.5 MB. The weight depends only on the photo dimensions.

In our measurement, the photos grew between 17 and 39 times. The brick pillar photo went from 2.70 MB to 46.5 MB, and the mixing console photo from 1.16 MB to 45.8 MB. The eight HEIC files weighed 13.1 MB together, and the same photos as TIFF weighed 369.9 MB.

You can therefore work out the TIFF weight before converting: multiply the width by the height of the photo and by 4. If you need a lossless but lighter file, use the HEIC to PNG converter, and just to view the photo in Windows, the HEIC to JPG converter is enough.

Every TIFF file has four 8-bit channels, red, green, blue and transparency, and no compression. The file contains just the image, without an embedded color profile and without EXIF data from the phone. We checked this on the eight files from our measurement: each HEIC file had EXIF data with the device model, and none of the output files still had it.

The pixel count stays the same as in the original. You set the print size in centimeters or inches in your layout program or in the print dialog, because the file does not store a resolution in dots per inch. The pixels to inches converter shows how many inches the photo takes up at a chosen resolution.

If the photos should go into one document for printing or sending, the HEIC to PDF converter is more convenient, as it places each photo on an A4 page. A finished TIFF file becomes a light JPG in the TIFF to JPG converter.