2.56 avg \/ 4.56 max<\/strong><\/td>131 KB<\/td><\/tr><\/tbody><\/table><\/figure>\n\n\n\nFive tools land in a dead heat, essentially at the limit of what the format allows. The sixth is in a different category, and it is visible:<\/p>\n\n\n\nEight colours from the test photo. Top: the photo as it should look. Bottom: the same photo after a converter dropped the colour profile. White and grey are unaffected; everything saturated shifts.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\nThis is not a subtle difference in a laboratory. Skies, skin tones and anything brightly coloured come back wrong, and because the file carries no profile at all, no amount of later editing tells you what the original was.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Test 2: does the photo still know when and where it was taken?<\/h2>\n\n\n\n Inside every iPhone photo is a metadata block: the date and time, the camera and lens, the exposure settings, and \u2014 if location services were on \u2014 the GPS coordinates, accurate to a few metres. What a converter does with that block is a real decision, and the six tools split three ways.<\/p>\n\n\n\nTool<\/th> Date taken<\/th> Camera & lens<\/th> GPS location<\/th><\/tr><\/thead> heictojpg.com<\/strong><\/td>kept<\/td> kept<\/td> kept<\/strong><\/td><\/tr>iLoveIMG<\/strong><\/td>kept<\/td> kept<\/td> kept<\/strong><\/td><\/tr>CloudConvert<\/strong><\/td>kept<\/td> kept<\/td> kept<\/strong><\/td><\/tr>Picflow<\/strong><\/td>kept<\/td> kept<\/td> kept<\/strong><\/td><\/tr>FreeConvert<\/strong><\/td>removed<\/td> removed<\/td> removed<\/td><\/tr> RedPanda Compress<\/strong><\/td>your choice<\/strong> \u2014 remove all (default), keep date & camera, or keep everything<\/td><\/tr><\/tbody><\/table><\/figure>\n\n\n\nNeither of the fixed behaviours is wrong in itself; they are right for different photos. Keeping everything is what you want when you are converting a holiday album that should still sort by date in Google Photos. Removing everything is what you want before a photo goes onto a public listing, a forum or a dating profile, because otherwise you are publishing the coordinates of wherever you took it. The problem is that a tool with one fixed behaviour is always wrong for half the jobs, and it does not tell you which half you are in.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The part where our own tool failed<\/h2>\n\n\n\n When we first ran this test, RedPanda Compress was the tool in the bottom row of that colour comparison. Our converter was writing out Display P3 pixel values under an sRGB label \u2014 exactly the mistake described above \u2014 and measured 2.56 \u0394E, the worst in the group alongside FreeConvert. It also removed all metadata with no way to keep any of it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
We fixed it. The colour profile is now copied into the JPG, and the metadata is a choice with three settings. Re-measured with the same fixture and the same script, the output is 0.15 \u0394E \u2014 tied with the best in this comparison and slightly ahead of heictojpg.com. The image data itself did not change by a single pixel value.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
We are telling you this because it is the honest way to publish a comparison you appear in, and because it is a useful warning: this defect is invisible unless you go looking for it. It produces a perfectly valid JPG that opens everywhere and looks fine on its own. You only see the problem next to the original.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Tool by tool<\/h2>\n\n\n\nheictojpg.com: the fastest route if you have a big pile<\/h3>\n\n\n\n The best-known name for this job, and it earns it: colour and metadata both came through intact, and it takes up to 200 photos at a time. The output was the smallest in the test at 79 KB, achieved with noticeably more aggressive compression than the others \u2014 fine for sharing, slightly less so if you are archiving. Your photos are uploaded to their servers.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Picflow: the same correctness, without the upload<\/h3>\n\n\n\n Picflow converts inside your browser \u2014 we checked the network traffic and nothing left the machine \u2014 and still kept the colour profile and the full metadata block. That combination is worth noting, because “we run locally” is often used as an excuse for losing things. It handled 100 twelve-megapixel photos without complaint, at about 2.8 seconds each, though its memory use climbed to around 600 MB doing it, which is the sort of thing that decides whether a phone survives the job.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
One thing to know: given an image with a transparent region, Picflow discards the transparency and writes out whatever pixels were underneath. If you have erased part of a photo, the erased part comes back.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
CloudConvert and iLoveIMG: correct, generous, and larger files<\/h3>\n\n\n\n Both got everything right and both produced a 135 KB file \u2014 noticeably larger than the rest, because they encode full-resolution colour information that the HEIC did not contain in the first place. Neither measured better for it. CloudConvert has by far the best options panel of the group if you want to override anything, and caps free use at 10 conversions a day. iLoveIMG has no such cap and sits alongside the rest of its image toolbox.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
FreeConvert: the one to avoid for photos<\/h3>\n\n\n\n FreeConvert returned a JPG with no colour profile at all and no metadata: 2.56 \u0394E average, 4.56 at worst, and a file that has lost both the information needed to display it correctly and the record of when it was taken. For a screenshot none of this matters. For a photograph, it is the worst outcome in this comparison. It is otherwise a capable converter with a large format list \u2014 this specific job is not where it is at its best.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
RedPanda Compress: nothing is uploaded, and you pick the metadata<\/h3>\n\n\n\n The conversion runs in your browser, so the photos never leave your device \u2014 no upload wait, no queue, no copy sitting on a server. Colour measured 0.15 \u0394E, tied for best here, and the JPG itself was the most faithful to the original of any tool in the test. Metadata is a three-way choice, defaulting to removing everything, and when you keep the date the ZIP of a converted batch stamps each photo with the date it was taken, so the files still sort correctly after you unzip them. There is no account, no daily cap and no watermark. The trade-off is that the work happens on your own hardware, so an older machine takes longer.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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