Convert HEIC to JPG

Why your iPhone photos will not open

The explanation takes twenty seconds and answers the question most people arrive with.

Since iOS 11, Apple devices have saved photos as HEIC — High Efficiency Image Container — rather than JPEG. It is a genuinely better format: roughly half the file size at the same visible quality, with support for 16-bit colour and things like Live Photos.

The problem is everywhere else. Windows needs an extension to view HEIC. Plenty of websites reject the upload. Older versions of Photoshop and Office cannot open it. Many printing services will not accept it. Android support is patchy and depends on the app. Email recipients frequently see a file they cannot open at all.

So the photo is fine — the world around it just has not caught up. Converting to JPEG trades a little file size for the certainty that the image opens on anything made in the last thirty years.

A useful tip while you are here: if this keeps happening, you can stop it at source. On an iPhone, Settings → Camera → Formats → Most Compatible makes the camera save JPEG from then on. It uses more storage, and it means no more converting. You can also set Settings → Photos → Transfer to Mac or PC → Automatic, which converts on the way out.

Convert the whole lot at once

Nobody has a single HEIC file. You have forty from a weekend.

Add as many as you want and they are converted in one run, each appearing in a list as it finishes so you can see the progress and the results. The original filenames are kept, with the extension changed — IMG_4021.HEIC becomes IMG_4021.jpg — so a converted set still matches whatever order or naming you had.

Practical notes for a large batch: the work happens on your own machine, so it takes as long as your device needs and a hundred large photos is a real wait. It also uses memory while it runs, so for a very large set it is worth doing a few dozen at a time rather than several hundred at once.

The quality setting, and why 90 is the right default

JPEG is a lossy format, so converting means choosing how much compression to accept. The slider defaults to 90%, which is deliberately high.

Leave it at 90 or above for photographs you care about — family pictures, anything you will print, anything you might edit later. At that level the difference from the original is not visible to the eye, and the file is still much smaller than a HEIC-to-lossless conversion would be.

Drop to 70–80 when the destination is the web, a document, a messaging app or an upload form with a size limit. The saving is significant and the loss is hard to see at normal viewing size.

Below 60 you will start to see it — soft blocks in smooth areas like skies and skin, and haloes around hard edges. Only go there if a file size cap forces you to.

One thing worth knowing: you cannot get the quality back. Converting at 50% and then re-saving at 95% does not restore anything — the detail is gone at the first step. So keep your HEIC originals until you are sure the JPEGs are what you need. If you need the file smaller afterwards, Compress Image lets you see the trade-off directly.

This converts from HEIC, not to it

Being clear about the direction, because the one thing this cannot do is the mirror image of what it does.

No web browser can create a HEIC file. The format is patent-encumbered and no browser ships an encoder for it, so no in-browser tool can produce one — this or any other. If you put a JPEG or PNG in, you will get a high-quality JPEG back out with a note saying so, rather than a silent failure or a file with the wrong contents.

If you genuinely need to create HEIC files, that means software on your own machine: an iPhone or Mac does it natively, and some desktop converters support it.

In practice almost nobody needs to. HEIC exists to save space on the device that made it; once a photo is leaving that device, JPEG is what you want.

Your photos stay on your device

This matters more here than for any other converter on this site, and it is worth being direct about.

The files you are converting are your camera roll. Photographs of your family, your home, your documents, your children. Every one carries embedded data — the GPS coordinates where it was taken, the exact time, the device it came from.

Every other HEIC converter asks you to upload that to a server. Most promise to delete it later. This one never sends it anywhere: the conversion happens inside the browser tab, and no file, no filename and no metadata leaves your machine. There is no upload limit and no daily quota, because there is no server involved.

One side effect worth knowing: because the image is redrawn during conversion, the EXIF data does not carry across to the JPEG. Location, timestamp and camera details are dropped. That is a privacy gain if you are about to share the photos, and a loss if you were relying on the dates — so keep the originals if the metadata matters to you.

Related tools

Convert Image Format handles the other format conversions — PNG, JPEG, WebP and the rest. Compress Image reduces the file size once you have your JPEGs, with a visible quality trade-off. Resize Image brings large iPhone photos down to sensible dimensions, which usually saves more than compression does.