HEIC to JPG

HEIC is the format an iPhone has used by default since iOS 11. It stores photographs at roughly half the size of an equivalent JPG, which is a genuine engineering achievement and the reason Apple adopted it — a phone holding ten thousand photos saves a great deal of space.

The difficulty is what it is built on. HEIC wraps the HEVC/H.265 video codec, and HEVC is covered by several patent pools that charge for decoder licences. That single fact explains almost every problem people have with the format: Windows does not include a decoder, most browsers refuse to display it, many Android phones cannot open it, and a long list of desktop applications simply do not know what the file is.

JPG has none of that baggage. It is thirty years old, patent-free, and understood by everything that has ever displayed an image. Converting trades some storage efficiency for the certainty that the photo will open wherever you send it.

Every other converter on this site works inside your browser. HEIC is the exception, and the reason is licensing rather than performance. Every JavaScript HEIC decoder that exists — heic2any, heic-decode, heic-convert, libheif-js — is a wrapper around the same libheif library, and libheif is LGPL-3.0. Shipping it inside a web bundle counts as distribution, which carries obligations that a minified chunk of JavaScript cannot meet.

Running the library on a server is not distribution, so that is where the decoding happens. Your photo travels over an encrypted HTTPS connection, is converted, and is deleted immediately afterwards. It is not stored, indexed, or used for anything else. We would rather say this plainly than claim a privacy property this particular tool does not have.

If you convert HEIC files regularly, it is worth changing the setting rather than the files. Under Settings, Camera, Formats, the 'Most Compatible' option makes the camera write JPG directly. You lose the storage efficiency, which on a modern phone is rarely the binding constraint.

There is a second setting that catches people out. Under Settings, Photos, the 'Transfer to Mac or PC' option can be set to 'Automatic', which converts HEIC to JPG during the copy, or to 'Keep Originals', which does not. A folder of unopenable .heic files on a Windows machine is very often the second setting doing exactly what it was told.

The HEIC was already lossily compressed by your phone, and encoding to JPG compresses it a second time. At the default quality this is not visible at normal viewing sizes, but it is a real generational step, so convert from the original HEIC rather than from a copy that has already been through something else.

Expect the JPG to be larger than the HEIC — usually somewhere between 1.5 and 2.5 times — because you are moving to a less efficient format. That is the trade you are making for universal compatibility. If you need a lossless copy for editing instead, convert to PNG, but be ready for a file several times larger again.