Is HEIC safe for archival use?

As a viewing derivative, yes - as a sole master, no. HEIC is lossy and comparatively young; archival best practice is to keep the CRW or convert it to DNG for preservation, then store HEIC alongside for browsing. The pairing gives you a future-proof master plus a copy every modern phone and photo service can display instantly.

Why heic.now is safe to use

heic.now is a regular HTTPS web app that runs file conversion on its own servers using well-known open-source encoders (Pillow, ImageMagick, mozjpeg, oxipng, libheif, libwebp, etc.). All traffic between your browser and our servers is encrypted in transit. Files are stored on private disks and a private S3-compatible bucket, never on public object URLs.

No software install is required — everything happens in your browser, so there is nothing to download, no plugin to update, and no background process running on your machine.

What we don't do

No signup wall. The first 10 conversions per day work without an account — no email, no name, no card.
No watermark. Your output is the unmodified result of the encoder. No logo, no border, no overlay.
No file scanning. We read the file header to detect the format and validate the size, but we don't open the image for content analysis, OCR, or moderation.
No tracking inside files. If you tick "Strip EXIF" we remove GPS coordinates, camera serial numbers and other metadata from the output.

How to verify it for yourself

If you're security-conscious, you can verify behaviour by:

Opening your browser's network inspector during a conversion — you'll see exactly one POST to /api/convert and a small set of polls to /api/jobs/<id>.
Re-downloading the output file 25 hours later — the link returns a 404 (file purged).
Reading the privacy policy and the terms of service in full.