BMP to HEIC Converter

BMP to HEIC: Is This the Conversion You Want?

A Windows bitmap stores raw pixels — a header, an optional colour table, then one uncompressed row after another — which is why a full-HD 24-bit BMP occupies about 6.2 MB no matter how simple the picture is. HEIC is the opposite approach: an HEVC-coded still inside the High Efficiency Image File Format container, squeezed hard by a video codec. The short answer is that HEIC is the right move when the destination is Apple software, and the wrong move when the file has to open anywhere else — outside Safari, no major browser will render it.

Side-by-side: BMP and HEIC

Convert to HEIC When...

• The file is destined for Photos on iOS, iPadOS or macOS, where HEIC is the native photo format — Apple made it the iPhone's default capture format with iOS 11 in 2017.
• You are reclaiming disk space on a folder of scans or screen captures that were saved as bitmaps and will never be edited again.
• You want modern compression without the visible blocking JPEG shows at low quality settings — HEVC intra coding holds up better at aggressive size targets.

Keep the BMP (or Pick Another Target) When...

• The picture goes into a web page, an email, or an upload form. Convert to BMP to JPG instead — it opens on everything.
• You need pixel-exact output for repeated editing or archival. HEIC is lossy; BMP to PNG keeps every pixel and is still dramatically smaller than the bitmap.
• The consumer is a Windows-only tool chain. Windows needs Microsoft's HEIF and HEVC extensions installed before Explorer and Photos will even show a .heic thumbnail.

How to Convert BMP to HEIC

1. Upload Your BMP File: Drag the bitmap onto the page or click "+ Add Files". Several bitmaps can be queued and converted in one pass with the same settings.
2. Pick a Quality Preset: Under Image Compression, the Quality Preset dropdown is preselected on "Very High (Recommended)". Step down to High or Medium when the size drop matters more than the last few percent of detail.
3. Cap the Size or Rescale (Optional): Switch Image Compression to Specific file size to aim at an exact figure in bytes, kilobytes or megabytes, or leave compression alone and use Image resolution — which starts on "Keep original" — to scale the pixel dimensions down instead.
4. Convert and Download: Click "Convert" and save the .heic. No sign-up, no watermark. Files are uploaded over an encrypted connection, converted on our servers, and deleted automatically after a few hours.

Where a HEIC File Opens

Frequently Asked Questions

How much smaller will the HEIC be than my BMP?

The drop is dramatic, because you are going from no compression at all to a modern video codec doing intra-frame compression. A bitmap's size is fixed by arithmetic — width x height x bytes per pixel, with each row padded out to a 4-byte boundary — so a 1920x1080 24-bit BMP is about 6.2 MB whether it shows a photograph or a blank wall. The HEIC that comes out is governed by content complexity instead, and is typically a small fraction of that. Lower the Quality Preset or set a Specific file size if you need to push it further.

Will I lose quality converting BMP to HEIC?

Yes, some — HEIC is a lossy format. BMP keeps every pixel exactly as it was written, while HEVC discards the detail an eye is least likely to notice. At the "Very High" preset the difference is hard to see on photographic content. Screenshots, UI captures and line art are the harder cases, because sharp high-contrast edges are exactly what block-based codecs struggle with; for those, BMP to PNG is the honest choice.

What is the difference between HEIC and HEIF?

HEIF is the container standard — ISO/IEC 23008-12, the High Efficiency Image File Format — and it can hold images coded by more than one codec. HEIC is the name used when the pictures inside that container are coded with HEVC (H.265), which is what Apple devices write and what this converter produces. The practical rule: every .heic is an HEIF file, but not every HEIF file is a .heic.

Does the HEIC keep transparency from a 32-bit BMP?

In practice this never comes up. Transparency in BMP only exists in the later V4 and V5 header variants, and the bitmaps Windows tools actually write are opaque, so there is no alpha channel to carry across. The HEIF container itself does define an alpha plane as an auxiliary picture type, but if your source is a normal 24- or 32-bit bitmap there is nothing transparent in it to preserve.

Why won't the HEIC open on my PC or in Chrome?

Because HEIC support is licensing-encumbered and stayed narrow. Safari has rendered HEIF images since version 17.0, and it is the only major browser that does — Chrome, Firefox and Edge do not, which is why HEIF sits around 15% of global browser usage. On Windows you need Microsoft's HEIF and HEVC extensions installed before the file shows up as an image at all. If the destination is not Apple software, HEIC to JPG turns the result back into something universal.

Is HEIC a better target than JPEG for a scanned bitmap?

Only if the scan will live inside the Apple ecosystem. HEIC gives a better size-to-quality ratio than JPEG at the same visual quality, but JPEG opens in every browser, email client, printer driver and upload form ever written. For archives that other people will open, JPEG or PNG remains the safer target; HEIC pays off when the files stay on iPhones, iPads and Macs.

Can I convert a folder of bitmaps in one pass?

Yes — queue them together and they all convert with the same Quality Preset and Image resolution settings, then download individually. That matters more for BMP than for most formats, because bitmaps are usually produced in bulk by screen-capture utilities, scanners and legacy Windows software, and it is exactly those piles of multi-megabyte files that benefit most from re-encoding.

Where does my bitmap go during conversion, and how long is it kept?

Your file is uploaded over an encrypted connection, converted on our servers, and deleted automatically after a few hours. There is no sign-up, no watermark on the output, and files are never shared or made public. Because bitmaps are large, the practical constraint on this page is upload size and time rather than the encode itself, which is quick once the file has arrived.