8/15/2020

Convert HEIC Files to PNG or JPG

Converting photos from HEIC to PNG or JPG is surprisingly simple with imagemagick. If you don't have imagemagick installed, you can install it with homebrew on mac like so:

brew install imagemagick

With imagemagick installed, you can now use mogrify to convert your HEIC files to the desired format. For example, convert a specific HEIC file to jpg like so:

mogrify -format jpg YOURFILE.HEIC

That's it! This simple command will create a jpg file for your image. Note that this will not delete the HEIC file.

Batch Convert HEIC Files

Converting a batch of HEIC files is just as easy. From your terminal, make sure you are in the directory that has the files you want to convert, then again use the mogrify command from above, but this time use an asterisk instead of a single name:

mogrify -format png *.HEIC

This will create a png file for every HEIC file in the current directory. Change this to jpg if you want the files to be jpg instead.

Conclussion

All credit for this goes to this post from zwbetz.com and the mogrify documentation on imagemagick.org. Check out the docs specifically for -format to learn more.

I mentioned this in a previous post, but thought it deserved it's own explanation after seeing over a dozen reddit thread where people were trying to figure this out.