The screenshot problem
Screenshots pile up. Recipes, tickets, chat receipts, error messages, maps: they’re usually PNG, and a full-resolution PNG screenshot can be surprisingly heavy, especially when it contains a photo or a busy web page. Thousands of them quietly fill a phone or laptop.
HEIC can store the same picture in a fraction of the space. That makes PNG to HEIC a decent clean-up job for screenshot folders you want to keep but rarely open.
Transparency is preserved
This is where HEIC beats the obvious alternative. If you converted PNGs to JPG to save space, every transparent pixel would be filled with a solid colour. HEIC supports an alpha channel, so logos, icons, stickers and cut-out subjects keep their see-through backgrounds after conversion.
What shrinks well, and what doesn’t
| PNG content | Expected result |
|---|---|
| Photos saved as PNG | Big savings |
| Screenshots of web pages and apps | Good savings |
| Cut-outs with transparency | Good savings, alpha kept |
| Tiny icons and flat-colour logos | Small savings, sometimes none |
PNG is already very efficient at flat colour, so simple graphics are the least worth converting. Try a few files and compare sizes before doing a whole folder.
Before you delete the originals
HEIC is lossy. For screenshots you keep for reference, that’s fine. For design source files, UI assets you’ll edit, or anything that must stay pixel-exact, keep the PNG. Also remember that HEIC isn’t welcome everywhere: to share a converted file later, you may need HEIC to PNG to go back again. You can check how a converted file looks first in the HEIC viewer.
Encoded in your browser, slowly but privately
Screenshots often contain things you’d never upload on purpose: bank balances, private messages, two-factor codes. This tool encodes them with an HEVC encoder (kvazaar) compiled to WebAssembly, running inside your browser tab. It’s slower than a native app, a few seconds for a large image, but your screenshots stay on your device the whole time. To shrink JPGs instead, use JPG to HEIC.