Research27 September 2026

People don't convert files. They escape them.

A year of US searches to convert one file format into another, read for which way they point. For every search to make a WebP there are 14 to get out of one. Nobody searches for a way to make a HEIC. The formats people leave are young, and the ones they go to are more than thirty years old.

A search to convert a file has a direction. "WebP to PNG" is someone holding a WebP who needs something else. "PNG to WebP" is someone who wants one. Add up both directions for every format and you can see which formats people are trying to get out of, and where they go.

For every US search to turn an image into WebP, there are 14 to turn one out of it. For HEIC, the format iPhones save photos in, there are 343,700 searches a month to convert out and not one to convert in. Nobody searches for a way to make a HEIC.

The one-way doors

Rank every format with at least 20,000 conversion searches a month by the share of them that leave it. HEIC, M4A, Pages, AVIF, MKV, WebP, MOV: at the top, at least 93% of the searches that name the format are trying to leave it. At the bottom sit ICO, MP3, GIF, Word, Excel, Text.

Four of the doors are Apple's

HEIC, M4A, Pages, MOV. Four of them are what an iPhone or a Mac saves by default: photos, voice memos, screen recordings, documents. They open fine on the device that made them, and not everywhere else, so the moment a file has to go to a Windows laptop, a web form or someone else's app, it has to be converted. Almost no one converts anything into them.

The web's new formats are traps for the people who save them

WebP and AVIF were made to make web pages lighter, and they do. Sites serve them to save bandwidth. Then a visitor saves the image and finds the app they want to use it in will not open it. Searches to get out of WebP averaged 10,192 a month in 2019 and 58,600 by February 2022, 6 times as many. AVIF escapes averaged 898 a month in 2021 and now run at 60,617.

One caution about the lines. In March 2022 the WebP and AVIF searches both jumped in a single month, and so did the searches to leave HEIC, which has nothing to do with the web. A step that size across unrelated formats in the same month looks more like a change in how Google counts these searches than a change in people, so read the level after it with care. The shares leaving each format compare searches in the same months, and do not depend on it.

People leave young formats for old ones

Put each format's first release year beside the share of its searches that leave it, and a pattern shows. The formats people flee are young: the median one was first released in 2005. The formats they flee to are old: the median one in 1992. JPG, MP3, GIF and PDF all date from before 1994. Across the 20 formats with a single release date, the rank correlation between age and escape is 0.71 (permutation p = 0.0007).

A new format has to win over every app that might one day be asked to open it. JPG has had 34 years. That is the whole story of the chart: the files people convert are the ones the rest of their software has not caught up with, and the files they convert to are the ones everything already opens. The biggest single flows make the same point: MP4 to MP3, PDF to Word, HEIC to JPG.