After a few months of backpacking in the Southeast Asia place, I returned with more than 2,000 pictures taken with my iPhone mobile cell: golden temples in Chiang Mai, night markets in Hanoi that are as chaotic as possible, and sunsets in Ha Long Bay that literally caused me to take a second breath. I was waiting to make them known to the world. Then I attempted to post them in my traveller blog.
Then I tried uploading them to my travel blog. Half wouldn’t load. The other half were rejected outright. One platform displayed a grey box where my best shot of the trip should have been.
Welcome to the HEIC problem — the silent saboteur of travel bloggers everywhere.
What Even Is HEIC, and Why Should You Care?
HEIC image format (High Efficiency Image Container) is Apple’s iphone default photo format since iOS 11. It’s clever engineering — your photos take up roughly half the storage space of a JPEG at similar visual quality. Great for your phone. Terrible for almost everything else in the world.
Here’s the honest reality of shooting in HEIC:
- Most websites don’t support HEIC natively — WordPress, Squarespace, Wix, and others will either reject the file or display a broken image placeholder
- Windows PCs can’t always open them without first installing additional codecs from the Microsoft Store
- Many social platforms still handle HEIC inconsistently — sometimes uploading fine, sometimes silently converting and losing metadata
- SEO crawlers don’t read HEIC image metadata as cleanly as PNG or JPEG, which can quietly hurt your rankings
- Readers on non-Apple devices may simply see nothing where your beautiful photo should be
PNG, on the other hand, is universally accepted, lossless in quality, and plays nicely with every platform, browser, CMS, and blogging engine out there. It’s the format the web was essentially built around, and for good reason.
My Conversion Workflow (The One I Actually Stick To)
After a lot of frustration and trial and error across three different blog platforms, here’s what now works for me every single time — regardless of what device I’m working from.
On Mac (The Easiest Route by Far)
In you’re on a Mac book laptop, you basically already have everything you need. Preview — that humble built-in app most people ignore — handles HEIC to PNG conversion natively and beautifully:
- Open your HEIC file in Preview
- Go to File → Export
- Choose PNG from the format dropdown
- Hit Save — genuinely done in ten seconds
For batch converting an entire folder of travel photos, the Automator app (also built into macOS, also free) lets you process hundreds of files in a single bulk export that takes under two minutes. I now run this the moment I transfer photos from my phone — it’s become as automatic as charging the device.
On Windows
Windows users have a few solid options depending on how many photos you’re dealing with:
- iMazing HEIC Converter — completely free, drag-and-drop simple, no account or subscription required. This is the one I recommend to every travel blogger friend I have, no hesitation
- HEIC to PNG via Paint — if you’ve already installed Apple’s HEIC codec from the Microsoft Store, you can open files and re-save them as PNG directly through Paint
- XnConvert — a free batch converter that handles hundreds of files simultaneously and gives you solid control over output quality
Online Tools (When You’re on the Road)
Sometimes you’re working from a hostel laptop in Vietnam, a co-working space in Bali, or a friend’s computer in a pinch – and your usual setup simply isn’t available. These browser-based tools have genuinely saved me more than once:
- HEICtoJPG.com — despite the name, it converts to PNG too and works quickly
- Convertio.co — handles large files and a wide variety of formats without much fuss
- CloudConvert — my personal favourite for quality control; it lets you tweak compression settings and preview output before downloading
One important heads up: Avoid uploading personal, sensitive, or private images to random third-party converters. For travel photos destined for a public blog, it’s completely fine — but be thoughtful about what you’re handing over to servers you don’t control.
Why PNG Over JPEG for Travel Blogs?
This is where most people get genuinely confused. Both PNG and JPEG beat HEIC for web compatibility, but they’re not interchangeable — they serve different purposes, and knowing which to use when actually matters for your blog’s performance.
| Format | Best For | Watch Out For |
| PNG | Crisp landscapes, screenshots, images with text overlays | Larger file sizes than JPEG |
| JPEG | High-volume photo galleries, hero images, quick-loading posts | Some quality loss through compression |
| HEIC | Saving phone storage | Almost nothing web-related |
For blog headers, featured images, and detail-heavy travel shots, I lean toward PNG when I want pixel-perfect clarity — especially for landscape photography where fine detail matters. I switch to JPEG when I’m publishing a post with 30+ images and page load speed becomes a real concern. Either format is infinitely better than uploading raw HEIC and hoping for the best.
A Few Things I Wish I’d Known at the Start
Here are the minor tweaks that have already positively impacted the workings of my travel content in terms of its online performance:
- File renaming before uploading. IMG 4823.png tells Google nothing whatever, chiang-mai-doi-suthep-temple-sunrise.png is descriptive, searchable and does the active support of SEO without any additional effort.
- Compress after converting. Tools like TinyPNG can reduce your PNG file size by 50–70% with zero visible quality loss. Faster page load times mean lower bounce rates and happier readers — especially those browsing on mobile data.
- Check your iPhone camera settings. If you want to skip the conversion process altogether going forward, head to Settings → Camera → Formats and switch to “Most Compatible.” Your phone will shoot JPEG by default from that point on. You’ll lose a little storage efficiency, but you’ll save yourself this headache entirely.
- Back up your originals. You should always get your original HEIC files saved in a safe place before converting them to batch, whether that is on an external drive, iCloud or Google Photos. Non-destructive conversion happens when you retain the source files, but loss of originals is a misery that you do not desire.
The Bottom Line
HEIC is genuinely impressive technology for what it does — and I’m not here to argue with Apple’s engineering decisions. The format makes a real difference when you’re deep into a month-long trip and running low on storage space. But the moment those photos leave your phone and need to exist on the internet, HEIC becomes a liability.
It only requires a few minutes with the correct equipment and the correct behavior to convert to PNG. The reward is that the photos will be able to be loaded on all platforms, appear sharp on all devices and most importantly, be read by the readers who had to press the button to open your post in the first place.
You used actual time and money to have a visit to these places. You went up the hill and waited until you could see the light, and received the shot. Do not allow a file format to make your file visible to no one.