HEIC to Text

If you have ever tried to pull text out of an iPhone photo and been told “this file type isn’t supported,” you have met HEIC. Since iOS 11, iPhones and iPads save photos as .heic files by default — Apple’s take on the HEIF format. It is a genuinely good format: your photos look the same but take up roughly half the space of a JPEG. The catch is that plenty of tools, uploaders, and older OCR sites still choke on it, so the moment you want to read a photo you shot on your phone, you hit a wall.

The usual fix is annoying busywork: open Photos, export or duplicate the image as a JPG, dig the copy out of Files, and only then feed it to whatever tool you actually wanted to use. SafeOCR skips all of that. Drop a raw .heicstraight off your phone and it converts the photo for you — quietly, in the browser, using a lightweight converter that only loads when a HEIC actually shows up — and then reads the text. There is no separate “convert to JPG” step to remember, no second app in the loop.

That means the real-world iPhone captures just work. A photo of a receipt you need the total from, a whiteboard after a meeting, a page of a book, a business card, a shipping label, a serial number on the back of a device — shoot it, drop the HEIC in, and get selectable text back. Recognition keeps the reading order intact, so multi-line notes come out structured instead of scrambled, and you can click any single block to lift just one line or number.

Because your iPhone photos are often personal — receipts with your card, documents with names on them, a whiteboard full of things you would rather not post to a stranger’s server — it matters that none of this leaves your machine. Both the HEIC conversion and the text recognition happen entirely inside your own browser with WebAssembly and WebGPU. Your photo is never uploaded, the extracted text is never logged, and after the engine downloads once it keeps working with no connection at all. It reads 50+ languages, it is free and unlimited, and it runs on the same PP-OCRv6 engine as every other SafeOCR tool.

Already exported the photo as a regular JPG instead of HEIC? Photo to Text reads that the same way; and if it is a whole camera roll of iPhone shots rather than one, Batch OCR runs the entire set through in a single pass.