Convert HEIC to JPG

How to use it#

1. Drop your HEIC or HEIF photos into the box above. Several at once is fine.
2. Wait a moment for the first one. The decoder is downloaded once, then reused.
3. Set the quality if the default does not suit you.
4. Download them one at a time, or all together.

Why your iPhone photos will not open#

Since iOS 11 an iPhone saves photos as HEIC by default, which packs the same picture into roughly half the space of a JPEG. That is a real saving on a phone holding thousands of photos, and it is why Apple made the switch.

The problem arrives when the photo leaves the phone. Plenty of software still has no idea what a HEIC is: older versions of Windows, most web upload forms, a lot of printing services, and any number of internal tools at work. You get a file that looks fine on the phone and is rejected everywhere else.

Converting to JPEG trades the space saving for the ability to open the file anywhere. For a photo you are about to upload, print, or email, that is usually the right trade, and you still have the original on the phone.

Expect the file to get bigger#

HEIC uses a far more modern compression scheme than JPEG, so the same picture at the same visual quality takes about half as many bytes. Going the other way undoes that. A 2 MB HEIC commonly lands somewhere between 3 and 5 MB as a JPEG.

The quality slider is how you control that. Lowering it makes the JPEG smaller by discarding more detail, and because the conversion happens as you move it, you can watch the file size change and stop where the trade looks fair to you.

Why the first photo takes a few seconds#

Most browsers cannot read HEIC on their own. The format uses HEVC, which is patent encumbered, and of the major browsers only Safari ships a decoder for it. Doing this in any browser means bringing a decoder with us: about a megabyte of WebAssembly, downloaded the first time you drop a HEIC in.

That download happens once. The second photo, and the two hundredth, use the decoder already in memory. It is also why this page does not load that megabyte until you actually give it a HEIC, and why every other page on this site does not carry it at all.

Phones and backup services sometimes rename a PNG, a JPEG, or a WebP to .heic. The page reads the first bytes of each file, so one of those goes straight to the browser and comes out as a JPG like the rest, without waiting for the decoder.

What does not come across#

The picture is decoded to its pixels and written out as a fresh JPEG, so the metadata inside the original does not travel with it. The date the photo was taken, the location, the camera settings, and the orientation tag are all left behind. If those matter, keep the HEIC as well as the JPEG.

A HEIC can also hold more than one image: the frames of a Live Photo, a depth map, a burst. Only the main picture is converted, which is the one you see when you open the file.