HEIC to JPG converter
An iPhone shoots in HEIC by default, and most of the world cannot open it. Drop the photo below and it comes back as a JPG that opens anywhere, without going anywhere near a server.
Why an iPhone photo needs converting at all
Apple switched the iPhone camera to HEIC in 2017 because it stores the same photo in about half the space. The trade was that almost nothing outside Apple could read it. Windows still asks you to install an extension from the Microsoft Store, plenty of web forms reject the file outright, and the friend you sent it to sees a grey box.
The usual workaround is to email the photo to yourself, because Mail quietly converts it on the way. That works and it is also absurd: you are uploading a private photo to two mail servers to change a file extension. This page does the same conversion on your own device, in about a second.
JPG is the right target when the point is that it has to open. It has been the default photo format since the 1990s, and there is no device, no browser and no upload form that turns it away.
What is actually inside a HEIC
A HEIC is not one picture. A 12-megapixel iPhone photo is stored as a grid of forty-eight separate 512×512 tiles, each compressed with HEVC — the codec used for broadcast and Blu-ray video — plus a header describing how to lay the tiles out and where to crop the assembled grid back to 4032×3024. That is why so little software opens one: reading it means running a video decoder and then doing joinery.
Three different things can happen when you drop one on this page, depending on which browser you are in. Safari and iOS decode HEIC themselves, so nothing extra loads at all. Chrome and Edge cannot, so this page reads the file’s own boxes, hands the tiles to the HEVC decoder the browser already carries for video, and reassembles them — measured at 19 to 35 milliseconds for a 12-megapixel photo. Firefox can do neither, so it fetches a one-megabyte decoder compiled to WebAssembly. That download happens only in that browser, only after you have actually dropped a HEIC in, and only once.
Two things about the photo itself are worth knowing before you convert it. Its rotation is recorded as a property of the container, not as an EXIF tag — that is the detail converters get wrong, and why a photo shot upright comes back on its side from some of them. And the JPG is written from decoded pixels, so it carries no metadata whatsoever: no camera model, no timestamp, and no GPS coordinates. If the photo is going to someone you do not know, that is a feature. If you wanted the capture date kept, it is a real loss, and no setting on this page brings it back.
What the JPG keeps and what it drops
- The pixels stay the same size. A 12-megapixel photo comes out 12 megapixels; nothing is cropped or scaled.
- The file usually gets bigger, not smaller. HEIC is the more efficient format, so a 2 MB HEIC often lands around 3 MB as a JPG. That is the price of a format everything can read. If size is the problem rather than compatibility, the image compressor is the tool you want.
- Photos taken upright stay upright. Rotation in a HEIC lives in the container rather than in EXIF, which is exactly what a lot of converters get wrong and hand you a photo on its side.
Converting a HEIC to JPG, step by step
- JPG is already selected above.
- Drop your HEIC photos in, or click to browse.
- Download the result. It never left your device.
On a Mac or an iPhone the decode is Safari’s own, so a whole camera roll goes through without downloading anything extra.
HEIC questions people actually ask
Why will Windows not open my iPhone photos?
HEIC uses HEVC compression, which is patent-encumbered, so Windows does not ship a decoder for it by default. Microsoft offers a paid extension in its store. Converting to JPG sidesteps the whole question.
Will the photo lose quality?
A little, in the way any re-encode does. JPG is lossy, so the picture is decoded and written again. This page writes at a fixed quality of 90 out of 100, where the difference is not something you will see on a photo; it shows up on hard edges and flat colour, which phone photos do not have much of.
What happens to a Live Photo?
Nothing, in both senses. The moving part of a Live Photo is a separate .mov file sitting next to the .heic in your library. Converting the still does not touch it, and does not bring it along either — you get a single JPG of the frame Apple treats as the photo.
Can I do a whole camera roll at once?
Yes, up to 50 photos in one go. They are converted one after another so a phone does not run out of memory, and the results come back as a single zip.
Is JPEG the same thing as JPG?
Identical. The format is JPEG; the three-letter extension is a leftover from MS-DOS, which allowed no more than three. Both spellings mean the same file, and anything that opens one opens the other.
Nothing is uploaded
It runs on your device. Turn the network off mid-conversion and it still finishes — or check any converter yourself.
Free, and no account
No signup, no watermark, no upgrade prompt. No size cap beyond your own device, and up to 50 pictures a go.
Other ways out of HEIC
- HEIC to PNG For when the next tool in the chain insists on PNG.
- HEIC to WebP Keeps HEIC-like file sizes, but the web can actually read it.
- WebP to JPG The image you saved from a website that nothing will open.
- PNG to JPG For the screenshot that is too big to attach.
Or open the image converter to pick any combination, and the image compressor when the problem is size rather than format.