HEIC photos from an iPhone, and how to open them anywhere

You send a holiday photo to someone on Windows and they cannot open it. You upload a picture to a form and it refuses the file. You attach it to a listing and the site says the format is unsupported. The extension is .heic, and it is the default on every iPhone since 2017.

Apple did not pick it to annoy you

HEIC stores the same photo in roughly half the space of JPG, at the same visible quality. On a phone with thousands of photos that is a real difference: it is the reason your storage lasts as long as it does.

It also does things JPG cannot. It keeps depth information for portrait mode, handles wider colour, and can hold several images in one file, which is how Live Photos work.

The catch is support. JPG is thirty years old and every device on earth reads it. HEIC is newer and patent encumbered, so support arrived slowly and unevenly: recent Windows needs an extension from the Microsoft Store, plenty of web forms reject it outright, and older software has never heard of it.

Convert only when you need to

There is no reason to convert your whole library. Inside Apple's world, HEIC works fine and saves you space. Convert the individual photos you are about to send somewhere that cannot read them:

• an official form or a public administration portal,
• a marketplace listing,
• a document you are sending to someone on Windows,
• anything going into a website.

For everything else, leave the originals alone.

Converting

1. Open HEIC to JPG and drop your photos in. You can do several at once.
2. Set the quality. 85 percent is the sensible default and the difference against the original is invisible on a screen.
3. Convert and download. Several files come back as a ZIP.

It runs in your browser. Family photos are not uploaded anywhere, which for holiday pictures with your children in them is worth caring about.

One quality note. HEIC to JPG is a conversion between two lossy formats, so a little detail goes each time. Once is fine. Converting a JPG back to HEIC and then to JPG again is how photos slowly turn to mush. Keep the original.

Turning it off on the phone

If you never want to deal with this again: Settings, Camera, Formats, Most Compatible. The phone starts saving JPG, and your photos take about twice the space.

Worth knowing: with the setting on High Efficiency, transferring photos to a Windows PC by cable usually converts them to JPG automatically anyway. Sending the same photo through a messaging app often converts it too, and usually shrinks it hard. If someone tells you your photo looks soft, that is frequently why.

The size problem underneath

Converting to JPG makes files larger, and a modern phone photo is already 4 to 8 MB. If you are attaching several to an e-mail or a listing form, run them through Compress image afterwards, or scale them down with Resize image. A listing photo does not need to be 4000 pixels wide; 1600 is plenty and loads far faster.

Frequently asked questions

Does converting HEIC to JPG lose quality?

A little, because both are lossy formats. At 85 percent quality the loss is invisible on screen. Keep the HEIC original and treat the JPG as a copy for sending.

Can I convert several photos at once?

Yes. Drop in a batch and you get a ZIP back with all of them converted.

Will the photo keep its date and location?

Basic EXIF information such as the capture date carries across. If you would rather it did not, strip the metadata with the image metadata tool before sharing.

Why can Windows not open HEIC by default?

Licensing. The format is patent encumbered, so Microsoft ships the codec as a separate item from the Store rather than including it. Recent Windows 11 handles it better than Windows 10 did.

Are my photos uploaded to a server?

No. The conversion happens in your browser, so the pictures stay on your device.