Convert bulk HEIC files to PNG, JPG etc

May 2, 2020 11:23 AM

Is there a way to convert 700+ HEIC images at once into a format like PNG or JPG?

I've been given a ton of HEIC photos. It's Saturday. For Monday, I have to put them all up in a website. I need them to be PNG or even JPG. I have no idea how to do this without opening every single file. Is there a converter? This is for a school project and we are crisis schooling and they aren't being flexible! Thanks.

posted by Chaussette and the Pussy Cats to Technology (11 answers total)

Are you on macOS? Then it's easy: drag & drop the files all at once into Photos.app, then export them all at once (File menu/ Export...).
posted by soylent00FF00 at 11:28 AM on May 2, 2020 [1 favorite]

Response by poster: Oh, no. Sorry. I'm on WIndows. The person who did them is on iOs.
posted by Chaussette and the Pussy Cats at 11:33 AM on May 2, 2020

Best answer: I can not vouch for them personally, but https://imazing.com/heic/download should do the trick and is free, available for mac and windows.
posted by soylent00FF00 at 11:38 AM on May 2, 2020 [1 favorite]

IrfanView should do this. It can read HEIC files (do these steps to load them look for HEIC down the page a little from that link), and save JPG or PNG. And it should bulk convert even though I've never bulk converted HEIC, but if it can load, it can usually convert.
posted by deezil at 11:44 AM on May 2, 2020 [4 favorites]

Like deezil said, I've used IrfanView for batch conversions of PNGs to JPGs before. Asssuming you can get it to reading HEIC files per his link, I would think it would work. Once you have the codecs and plugins loaded, I would just make a "working input" folder somewhere, throw a few of the files in it, make an "working output" folder, set that as the target, and run a small batch. Check the output and fine-tune it (there are a lot of options you might find desirable on a batch conversion like this) before you throw all 700 images at it.
posted by glonous keming at 12:20 PM on May 2, 2020 [1 favorite]

One of my coworkers was just able to get ImageMagick set up to do command-line conversion of HEIC to JPG. Apparently it involved some compilation but it "wasn't hard" (for values of "wasn't hard" that involve being a recent advanced degree-holding graduate from a school known for its CS program, so, scale appropriately).

Once you have ImageMagick going, you could use any number of scripting languages, or a batch job, to get the job done.

But Irfanview might be easier if you don't compile software from source for fun!
posted by Alterscape at 1:57 PM on May 2, 2020 [3 favorites]

ImageMagick has a binary release for Windows, not sure why you'd have to compile it yourself.

Here's almost your exact question (except on a Mac):
Convert HEIC images to JPG | zwbetz

If the pre-built Windows version includes Apple High efficiency Image Format support it would be a single command:
mogrify -format png *.heic
posted by zengargoyle at 2:48 PM on May 2, 2020 [4 favorites]

Cloud Convert works well. It's a web-based service, so your OS doesn't matter. They do let you convert HEIC to either JPG or PNG. I've used them for professional projects.

It has a free plan, but since you're on a time deadline, I recommend signing up for one of their packages to get more conversion-minutes. I think that you're going to want more than 25 minutes' worth of conversion time per day. $8 gets you 500 conversion minutes, and since you have 700+ files but few conversions take a full minute, that should do nicely for you. They do allow uploading multiple files at a time and building a batch to convert, so that you aren't stuck sitting in front of the computer.
posted by Tailkinker to-Ennien at 6:37 PM on May 2, 2020 [1 favorite]

(I was under the impression that HEIC support isn't included out-of-the-box, but since I wasn't in the loop for that, Zengargoyle, now that I'm thinking about it, it's possible that default apt sources for 18.04 just isn't new enough, in which case, mea culpa!)

One thing I learned yesterday: on Windows, the command is

magick mogrify ...

For some reason on Windows all the commands are sub-commands of magick, not their own executables!
posted by Alterscape at 7:26 PM on May 2, 2020 [2 favorites]

Yeah Alterscape... I'm on Debian stable and sorta figured that if Debian includes it that there's probably no reason why any other OS build wouldn't include it since Debian is so picky about things. It's possible that other OS packages/builds don't enable support but it seems a bit weird...

Thanks for the Windows:
magick sub-command ...
info.

It takes me 0.284s to convert an example 1440x960 HEIC file to JPG (0.723s for PNG) so being gracious on size and taking 2s per image it works out to about 23 minutes and change for 700 pictures depending.

Nice format sizewise I guess....
HEIC - 293,600B
JPG - 733,774B
PNG - 2,582,514B
GIF - 1,389,492B

Don't think I can tell the difference between them visual-wise.
posted by zengargoyle at 10:50 PM on May 2, 2020 [2 favorites]

Response by poster: Thank you! I was able to get Imazing to do it, so I marked that as best answer, but these were all great answers and I appreciate all the suggestions. Thank you so much.
posted by Chaussette and the Pussy Cats at 1:49 PM on May 6, 2020