Convert HEIC to JPG
Turn the HEIC photos an iPhone saves into JPGs that open anywhere. Runs on your device, so the photos are never uploaded.
Drop HEIC files here or paste from the clipboard.
Your files are processed on this device. Nothing is uploaded.
What actually changes
A HEIC holds the same picture in roughly half the bytes, because it uses HEVC compression instead of JPEG's thirty-year-old scheme. Converting to JPG decodes that and re-encodes it the old way, so the file typically doubles or triples in size for the same visible quality. In exchange it opens on every operating system, email client and photo frame made since the nineties. Depth maps, Live Photo video and any secondary images inside the container are discarded, because a JPG holds exactly one picture.
| HEIC | JPG | |
|---|---|---|
| Compression | Lossy | Lossy |
| Transparency | Yes | No |
| Format can be animated | No | No |
The file size goes up, not down
This is the one that surprises people. A 1.8MB HEIC commonly becomes a 4MB JPG and it looks wrong because converting usually means compressing. Nothing has gone awry: you moved from an efficient codec to an inefficient one and the inefficiency is the price of universal support. Lower the quality slider to around 80 if the size matters more than the last few percent of detail.
Who runs into this
Almost always someone moving photos off an iPhone onto something that isn’t an Apple
device. The photos look fine on the phone, arrive as .heic and then Windows Photo
Viewer shrugs, the print shop’s upload form rejects them or a colleague on an older
machine sees nothing at all. The file isn’t corrupt and the phone did nothing wrong;
the receiving end simply has no decoder for it.
The second common case is upload forms. A form with accept="image/jpeg,image/png"
won’t let you select a HEIC at all, which reads like the file is broken rather than
like the form is out of date.
Doing it on the phone instead
If this keeps happening, change the source rather than converting every time. Under Settings, Camera, Formats, choosing Most Compatible makes the camera write JPG from then on. Photos already taken stay HEIC. There is also a quieter setting: when you AirDrop or share photos, iOS often converts to JPG automatically for non-Apple destinations, which is why the same photo sometimes arrives usable and sometimes doesn’t.
What the quality slider is doing
JPEG throws away detail in a way tuned to human vision and the slider sets how aggressively. At 90 the result is visually indistinguishable from the HEIC for almost any photograph. At 80 it is still hard to tell apart and the file is meaningfully smaller. Below about 60, smooth areas such as skies start to band and edges pick up halos. There is no universally correct setting, but 85 is a reasonable default for photos you intend to keep.
Common questions
Why does my iPhone save HEIC instead of JPG?
Because it halves the storage each photo takes. Apple switched the default in iOS 11 and the saving is real, which is why they haven’t switched back. You can tell the camera to write JPG instead under Settings, Camera, Formats, by choosing Most Compatible, though that only affects photos taken afterwards.
Why will Windows not open my HEIC files?
Windows needs the HEVC Video Extensions from the Microsoft Store to decode HEIC and that codec is patent encumbered, which is why it isn’t simply included. Some machines have it preinstalled through the manufacturer and some don’t, which is why the same file opens on one PC and not another.
Does converting lose quality?
A little, unavoidably. The HEIC is decoded to pixels and those pixels are compressed again as JPEG, which is a lossy process. At the default quality the difference isn’t visible at normal viewing sizes. What you can’t do is convert back to HEIC later and recover anything, so keep the originals if you have the space.
What happens to my Live Photos?
The still frame converts and the short video attached to it doesn’t, because a JPG has nowhere to put it. If the movement matters, export the Live Photo as a video from the Photos app before converting the still.
Can I convert a whole camera roll at once?
Yes. Drop as many files as you like and they’re converted one after another, then offered as a single zip. Because nothing is uploaded there is no size cap to hit, though a few hundred photos at once will use a lot of memory on a phone.