Convert HEIC to JPG

HEIC is the extension Apple gives to a photo stored in the HEIF container — High Efficiency Image File Format. Inside, the picture is encoded with HEVC, the same compression family used for 4K video, and that is what makes it so much better than JPEG at the same visual quality: about half the file size for the same photo.

Apple switched the iPhone camera to it in iOS 11, released in 2017, and it has been the default on every iPhone since. A HEIC can also hold more than one image, which is how Live Photos, bursts and depth data are stored in a single file. This converter takes the main photo out of that file and writes it as a JPG.

You may also see the extension .heif. It is the same container, and both are accepted here.

Because almost nothing outside the Apple ecosystem reads it without help. The usual places it fails:

• Windows 10 and 11. Support needs the HEIF Image Extensions package from the Microsoft Store, and on many machines the matching HEVC video extension is a paid add-on. Without them, File Explorer shows an empty thumbnail and Photos throws an error.
• Older Android phones. Android has read HEIF since version 10, but plenty of apps on older devices still cannot decode one.
• Photo editors. Photoshop versions before 2019 have no HEIC support at all, and several older editors still refuse it today.
• Web upload forms. Job applications, visa portals, insurance claims and school systems overwhelmingly accept JPG and PNG only. This is the single most common reason people convert.
• Office documents and email. Dropping a HEIC into Word or an older mail client usually produces a placeholder rather than a picture.

1. Choose the photo on your device. Drop the .heic or .heif file onto the panel above, or press Browse photos. On an iPhone you can pick it straight out of your camera roll. The limit is 20 MB, which is far more than any iPhone still photo.
2. Press Convert to JPG. There is nothing to configure. The decoder is already in the page, so the photo keeps its full resolution, is written at quality 90, and never leaves the device it is on.
3. Download the JPG. The JPG appears in the panel with its size next to the original, and the download button saves it. Now it will open anywhere.

For the practical side of the result — what the JPG keeps, what it leaves behind, and why renaming a .heic file to .jpg never works — see HEIC to JPG.

If you convert the same photos every week, change what the camera writes instead. On your iPhone open Settings, tap Camera, tap Formats and choose Most Compatible. From that point on the camera saves JPEG, and video saves as H.264.

The trade is real: JPEG files are roughly twice the size, so your phone storage fills up faster, and Most Compatible caps some of the higher frame-rate video modes. Photos already in your library are not converted — the setting only affects what is written next.

There is a second setting worth knowing about. In Settings → Photos, at the bottom, the Transfer to Mac or PC option can be set to Automatic, which converts photos to JPEG as they copy across a cable. Set to Keep Originals it hands over the HEIC untouched, which is how most people end up with files their computer cannot read.

A little, and only once. The HEIC is decoded back to raw pixels and then re-encoded as a JPEG at quality 90 — a high setting where the difference from the source is very hard to see even side by side at full zoom. Nothing is scaled, cropped or rotated, and the output has exactly the pixel dimensions the original had.

What does change noticeably is the file size, and in the wrong direction. Expect the JPG to be roughly twice the size of the HEIC, because JPEG simply cannot pack the same picture as tightly. That is the price of a format everything can open. If the result is too big for wherever you are sending it, run it through the compressor afterwards and set a target size in KB.

HEIC and HEIF files up to 20 MB. The file is checked by its actual signature rather than its name, so a renamed file is rejected with a reason instead of failing halfway through. Live Photos convert to their still frame; the motion is not kept.

The conversion runs on your own device. Your photo is opened where it already is and the JPG is written on the same machine, so the picture never reaches us and there is no copy of it anywhere else. The JPG is built from raw pixels and carries no EXIF or GPS data, which matters more here than anywhere else on the site: iPhone photos record the exact coordinates where they were taken.

The limit that depends on you is memory. A 12-megapixel photo becomes roughly 46 MB of raw pixels once it is opened, and the conversion needs room for more than one copy of that, so a phone with very little free memory may be told the job will not fit before it starts — which is better than the tab closing halfway through.