Convert HEIC to PDF
Turn iPhone photos — receipts, forms, whiteboards, documents you snapped — into a single PDF that any office or upload portal accepts, one photo per page. Expect a much larger file than the photos: the numbers are below. Your photos are never uploaded.
Drop HEIC photos here or click to choose
One photo per page — decoded and assembled on your device
How to convert HEIC photos to a PDF
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Drop your
.heicor.heiffiles above, or click the box to choose them. - Check the numbered list: that is the page order. Use Remove to drop a photo you do not want.
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Press Create PDF. One photo keeps its name
(
IMG_0412.heicbecomesIMG_0412.pdf); several are saved together asheic-photos.pdf.
How big the PDF gets
We measured it with the same decoder and the same PDF code this page runs. A script draws two 12-megapixel test pictures pixel for pixel — a detailed landscape and a page of text photographed on a desk — and encodes them as HEIC with Apple’s own encoder on a Mac, the same kind an iPhone uses. Synthetic photos are not your photos, so read the table for its shape rather than exact sizes.
| Test photo | HEIC | PDF ÷ HEIC | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Landscape, 4032 × 3024 | 0.91 MB | 11.13 MB | 12.2× |
| Document on a desk, 3024 × 4032 | 1.01 MB | 5.07 MB | 5.0× |
| Both in one two-page PDF | 1.92 MB | 16.20 MB | 8.4× |
In these two tests the document photo grew less, most likely because its large areas of plain paper compress well even without HEIC, while the landscape is detail from edge to edge. Either way, a handful of photos can exceed the 10–25 MB limits many email services and forms set.
This page or the JPG route?
| Compared | Direct (this page) | HEIC to JPG, then JPG to PDF |
|---|---|---|
| What goes into the PDF | Every decoded pixel, stored losslessly | The JPG file, unchanged |
| Size | 5.0–12.2× the HEIC in our tests | The JPGs plus about 950 bytes per page |
| Quality | Exactly what the HEIC holds | One extra round of JPG compression |
| Steps | One | Two |
For a sense of scale: a quality-85 JPG of our landscape, made with a desktop JPEG encoder, was 1.05 MB — against 11.13 MB for the direct PDF. Your browser’s encoder will land somewhere near that, not on it. So for an attachment with a size cap, go through HEIC to JPG and then JPG to PDF, which can also fit two or four photos on each A4 sheet. For an archive copy, a fine print or a scan you may zoom into, stay here and keep every pixel.
Why convert HEIC photos on your own device?
iPhones save photos as HEIC by default, and plenty of places still will not take it: benefit and visa portals, insurers, landlords, an office PC without the right codec. The photos people need to turn into a PDF are rarely holiday pictures — they are an ID card, a payslip, a signed lease, a doctor’s note. Those are poor candidates for a stranger’s upload server.
Here the HEIC decoder is fetched into your browser when you press Create PDF and does its work locally; the photos are read from your device and the PDF is written back to it. There is no server-side quota. A long batch of 12-megapixel photos is limited by your device’s memory, so on an older phone, convert in smaller groups.
Frequently asked questions
Are my iPhone photos uploaded?
No. libheif, the open-source HEIC decoder, runs in this tab and pdf-lib writes the PDF in your browser’s memory. The page, the decoder download and advertising make normal network requests, but none of them carries your photos.
Why is the PDF many times bigger than my photos?
HEIC is one of the most compact photo formats there is, and PDF cannot store it. This tool decodes each photo and stores it losslessly, which keeps every pixel but gives up HEIC’s compression. In our two test photos the PDF came out 5.0 to 12.2 times the size of the HEIC file, with the detailed landscape at the top of that range and the mostly plain document photo at the bottom.
How can I make the PDF smaller?
Convert the photos with HEIC to JPG first, then build the PDF with JPG to PDF. A JPG goes into a PDF unchanged — in our test the PDF was the JPG plus about 950 bytes — so the PDF ends up the size of your JPGs. The cost is one round of lossy JPG compression, controlled by the quality slider.
Why are the pages so large when I print?
Each page takes the photo’s pixel size as its size in points, so nothing is cropped or scaled down. A 12-megapixel iPhone photo becomes a 56 × 42 inch page (about 142 × 107 cm). PDF viewers zoom it to fit the screen, and print dialogs normally offer to fit it to the paper; it only looks odd in the document properties.
Is the location or camera information kept?
No. Only the decoded pixels go into the PDF, so the photo’s EXIF data — date taken, camera model and GPS position — is not copied. Keep the original HEIC if you need that information.
What about Live Photos?
A Live Photo is a still HEIC plus a separate short video. This tool uses the still image; the motion part does not go into the PDF.
Can I change the order of the pages?
Pages follow the numbered list, which is the order you added the photos. To move one to the end, remove it and add it again. For heavier rearranging, create the PDF and then use Organize PDF.