What is the best way to bulk convert heic to png on my Mac?

Yer_Man wrote:

Gee, whatever you do don't tell all those engineers who work for Canon, Nikon, Panasonic, Sony et al who make cameras and are addicted to Jpegs.

I don't think "addicted" the right word. That conjures up all sorts of unsavoury images.

I realize that many consumer electronics use JPG for their cheaper devices. Maybe this is just a technique to charge more money for devices that can generate higher quality images with TIFF and RAW formats. That's the oldest trick in the book. They do more work to remove data and add artifacts in order to save images in JPG format - all to give more value to the more expensive products.

But why are we even talking about JPG at all? I can understand why Canon, Nikon, Panasonic, Sony use JPG. But the OP specifically asked about PNG, a higher-quality format. If we wanted to try to guide the user towards some specific format, TIFF would be a far better choice. It would preserve all of the data from the HEIC, including colour space. The Windows PC might have more difficulty with a TIFF, but even on PCs, there are plenty of 3rd party apps that support TIFF.

The goal is to get the files out of HEIC format so they are more accessible. Since we don't know where these images are going to end up, or how they are going to be used, we probably shouldn't recommend formats like JPG, or even PNG, that could cause a loss of data.

Darrinschwartz wrote:

P.S. Does this work on Apple Silicon Mac?

Absolutely.

I probably should have mentioned that. 😎

Never mind. I have to look into these Quick Actions more closely.

I don't understand the need for any apps, when your mac does it on its own.

Luis Sequeira1 wrote:

I don't understand the need for any apps, when your mac does it on its own.

FWIW, having the option to set quality might be important to some.

Or the following Shortcut which allows for Quality and preserved metadata when configured as a Quick Action:

when you want that finesse over the Apple Convert Image QA.

Not to be a pest but is there a way to modify the Shortcut to choose the format, jpg, png, tiff, etc.?

Up to you. I was just curious. Might be helpful for some.

The manual is under the Help menu in the App.

I thought briefly about writing a short Zsh script here to do the HEIC to PNG conversion with sips and bailed on that idea for the handy Convert Image QA.

Old imaging habits die hard… 😉

Not to mention all digital cameras can shoot in JPG format to save space.