Convert HEIC to PDF: what to know
iPhones save photos as HEIC, and almost nothing that asks for a PDF — visa portals, expense systems, university applications, print shops — can open HEIC files. Converting to PDF solves both problems at once: the result opens everywhere and several photos become one tidy document. This page decodes the HEIC files on your device and writes the PDF in the browser; the photos are never sent anywhere.
How to convert HEIC to PDF
Drop your .HEIC or .HEIF files above, or choose them from Files on an iPhone or iPad. The first time you add one, the page fetches a small decoder (about 2 MB) so HEIC can be read in the browser; after that everything is instant. Order the photos with the arrows, pick a page size, and click Create PDF.
Windows sometimes reports HEIC files with no type at all. Toolkitta identifies files by their contents, so a .HEIC with a blank type still works.
What happens to the photo
PDF cannot hold HEIC data directly, so each photo is decoded and stored as a high-quality JPG (quality 92) inside the document. At that setting the difference from the original is not visible; the page in the PDF is the full resolution of the photo unless you turn on Reduce file size.
iPhone photos rely on an orientation flag. Toolkitta applies it while decoding, so portrait photos come out upright in the PDF instead of lying on their side — a common failure when HEIC files are converted naively. Live Photo video, depth data and the HEIC's EXIF metadata (including location) are not copied into the PDF.
Making a document that people can actually receive
A 12-megapixel photo becomes a 3–4 MB JPG page; ten of them make a 35 MB PDF, which many email services and portals will bounce. Reduce file size caps each photo at 2480 pixels on the long side and uses JPG quality 80, which brings a ten-photo document to around 5 MB and still prints crisply on A4. For documents of receipts and paperwork, that is the setting to use.
Use A4 or US Letter with Auto orientation for a document that prints one photo per page, or Fit to image for a stack of full-bleed pages. Margins of 10 or 20 mm leave room for stapling and notes.
Questions about HEIC to PDF
- Is the HEIC uploaded to a server?
- No. Decoding and the PDF are both done in your browser. Only the decoder itself is downloaded, once.
- Why did the page rotate my photo correctly when other tools did not?
- The orientation flag inside the HEIC is applied before the photo is placed, so the pixels are stored upright in the PDF.
- Can I combine many HEIC photos into one PDF?
- Yes, up to 20 per batch, in the order you set. Turn off Combine for one PDF per photo.
- Will the PDF keep location and camera metadata?
- No. The photo pixels are stored; EXIF metadata stays with the original HEIC.