HEIF to BMP Converter

HEIF to BMP: Thirty Years of Image Format History in One Step

.heif is the High Efficiency Image File Format, standardised as ISO/IEC 23008-12 with its first edition published in December 2017. It is built on the same ISO base media file format that underpins MP4, and it treats an image file as a small database: a primary picture, optionally a thumbnail, an alpha channel, a depth map, Exif metadata, even a whole sequence of images, with the pictures themselves usually coded with HEVC at eight or ten bits per channel.

.bmp is the Windows bitmap — a header followed by pixels, invented for a world where a display had 256 colours and a file format had one job. It carries no metadata worth the name, no alpha in the variants this page writes, and no concept of multiple images.

Converting one to the other throws away almost everything HEIF is for. That is fine when something specifically needs a bitmap; it is worth understanding first so nothing surprises you afterwards.

Side-by-side

How to Convert HEIF to BMP

1. Upload Your HEIF File: Drag it onto the page or click "+ Add Files". Files may come from a phone camera, a modern camera's HEIF mode, or software that exports the format; .heic is the same container with an HEVC-coded picture and Apple's branding.
2. Choose the Quality preset Deliberately: The dropdown offers High, Medium and Low. Bitmap output needs one of them selected, and they are not three grades of the same thing — they produce different bit depths and different compression, described in the next section. Make the choice rather than accepting whatever is showing.
3. Set Image resolution: Keep original is pre-selected. Width x Height gives exact dimensions, which is what you want when the bitmap is going into a fixed slot such as an embedded display or a splash screen. Preset Resolutions sets the height and lets the width follow the source aspect, and Resolution Percentage scales proportionally.
4. Convert and Download: Click Convert and save the .bmp. Files upload over an encrypted connection, are decoded and rendered on our servers, and are deleted automatically after a few hours — no sign-up, no watermark, never shared or made public.

The Three Presets Are Three Different Bitmaps

Measured on the same 800 x 600 image:

No preset produces a 24-bit true-colour bitmap. High is the top of the ladder and it is 16-bit. If your HEIF is a ten-bit file, that is ten bits per channel arriving and five leaving — a fivefold reduction in tonal steps. Even from an eight-bit source, a clean 256-step gradient came out of the High preset holding 65 distinct colours, and a source pixel of srgb(127,0,128) came back as srgb(132,0,132) because 127 is not on a five-bit boundary.

There is a counterintuitive corollary. On smooth material the Medium preset can preserve more distinct colours than High — 205 against 65 on that same gradient — because its palette is chosen to fit the image and then dithered, while High applies a fixed grid regardless of content. High is better on busy, detailed pictures; Medium is better on gradients and soft shading. If you want the picture to actually match the HEIF, neither is the answer: HEIF to PNG is lossless at full depth and far smaller than any bitmap.

What HEIF Carries That the Bitmap Will Not

• Transparency is discarded, not composited. A HEIF with an alpha channel loses it entirely, and the underlying colour is kept as-is rather than blended with a background. Measured on a half-transparent red image, the source pixel srgba(99.2%, 0%, 0.8%, 0.5) came back as fully opaque red through the High preset and as an opaque palette approximation through Medium. So a semi-transparent region does not become white or black — it becomes solid. If the transparency matters, convert to PNG instead, which keeps the alpha channel.
• Bit depth is cut hard. Ten-bit HEIF material — increasingly common from phones and cameras — lands at five bits per channel through High or an 8-bit palette through Medium and Low. Smooth skies and studio backdrops are where you will see it.
• Exif is gone. Capture time, camera, lens, exposure and location are lost, because the bitmap has nowhere to put them — BMP simply has no metadata block for that information. If any of it matters, keep the original .heif alongside the converted copy. Targets that at least have somewhere to store metadata, should you need one, are HEIF to TIFF and HEIF to JPG.
• Only one picture comes out. HEIF can hold several images in one file — a burst, a sequence, auxiliary items. A bitmap holds one. If your file genuinely contains multiple images rather than a picture plus a thumbnail, the safest route through this page is the High preset, which takes the primary image and writes a single file; on a truly multi-image HEIF the palette presets may not produce the file you expected. An ordinary phone photo with an embedded thumbnail is unaffected and converts normally.

Frequently Asked Questions

Is .heif the same as .heic?

Almost. HEIF is the container format defined in ISO/IEC 23008-12, and it can hold pictures coded in more than one way. HEIC is the specific brand of HEIF in which the pictures are coded with HEVC, which is what Apple devices write and what the .heic extension signals. In everyday terms a .heif and a .heic from a modern camera or phone hold the same kind of thing, and this page handles the .heif spelling. AVIF is the closely related format that uses AV1 coding instead of HEVC.

Why is the bitmap hundreds of times larger than the HEIF?

Because HEIF compresses with a modern video codec and BMP mostly does not compress at all. An 800 x 600 test image occupied about a kilobyte as HEIF and 960 kilobytes as a High-preset bitmap, because that path writes two bytes for every pixel regardless of what the picture contains. The palette presets are considerably smaller thanks to run-length encoding, at the cost of reducing the image to 256 or 86 colours. This ratio is not a fault in the conversion; it is the entire difference between the two formats.

Will transparency survive?

No. None of the three presets writes an alpha channel — High is RGB555 with no alpha bits, and Medium and Low are palette images. What is worth knowing is how it is lost: the alpha is simply dropped and the colour underneath is kept, so a fifty-percent-transparent red area comes out as solid red rather than as a blend with white or black. That is usually the wrong result visually. Convert to HEIF to PNG if the image has transparency you need.

My HEIF is 10-bit. What happens to the extra depth?

It goes. The best available bitmap path here is five bits per channel, so a ten-bit HEIF loses five bits per channel — from 1,024 levels down to 32. On photographic detail this is often invisible; on gradients, skies, studio backdrops and soft shadows it shows as banding, and dithering is what the Medium and Low presets use to disguise it. There is no path through this page that keeps ten-bit data. TIFF or PNG are the formats that can hold it.

Which preset should I actually pick?

Start from what the bitmap is for. High for an old Windows application, a control that loads bitmaps or a piece of firmware, because it is uncompressed and 16-bit BMP is very widely readable. Medium when file size matters and the image will be viewed at normal size; the dithering hides most of the palette reduction and the file is several times smaller. Low for an embedded display or a strictly size-limited slot, where 86 colours is a constraint you have accepted. And none of them if the goal is an accurate copy of the photograph — use PNG for that.

Does the picture get resized automatically?

No. Image resolution opens on Keep original, so the bitmap comes out at the HEIF's own pixel dimensions — which for a modern phone can be twelve megapixels or more, and at two bytes per pixel that is a bitmap of roughly 24 MB. If the target is a fixed slot, set Width x Height explicitly before converting; resizing during the conversion is much better than resizing a palette bitmap afterwards, because scaling a palette image forces a second round of colour quantisation.

Why does the colour shift slightly even on a simple image?

Because five bits per channel only allows 32 values where the source has 256 or 1,024, so every colour is rounded to the nearest one that can be represented. Measured, a source pixel of srgb(127,0,128) came back as srgb(132,0,132). The shift is small per pixel and usually imperceptible in isolation, but across a smooth gradient the rounding lands in visible steps. The Medium and Low presets dither instead, which trades a fine speckle for the absence of banding.

Can I convert several HEIF files in one go?

Yes — queue them and they convert with the same preset and the same resolution settings. Because the three presets behave so differently depending on picture content, convert one representative file first and look at it before running a large batch, particularly if some images are photographic and others are graphics or screenshots. The preset that flatters a photograph is not always the one that flatters a flat-colour graphic.

Is there any way to get a plain 24-bit uncompressed bitmap?

Not from this page — the ladder tops out at 16-bit RGB555, and that is the honest position rather than something to work around. If a receiving system genuinely requires 24-bit BMP, the practical route is to produce a lossless full-depth file here with HEIF to PNG and convert that to a 24-bit bitmap in whatever tool has the requirement, since almost any image editor writes 24-bit BMP directly. Going via PNG costs nothing in quality because PNG is lossless.

How are my files handled during the conversion?

Your .heif is uploaded over an encrypted connection, decoded and rendered on our servers, then deleted automatically after a few hours along with the bitmap it produced. There is no sign-up, no watermark, and nothing is shared or made public. HEIF files are small, so uploads are fast; the bitmaps coming back are the large part of this exchange, particularly at the High preset.