HEIC to JPG

What this HEIC converter does

Drop one HEIC or a hundred and each is decoded on your device and saved as JPG, PNG or WebP. HEIC is the format every iPhone has used by default since iOS 11, and it is the format Windows, many Android phones, web upload forms, older photo software and most email previews cannot open. This tool turns those files into something universal without sending them anywhere: the decoder is the open-source libheif library compiled to WebAssembly, downloaded once (about 1.4 MB) and run inside your browser. On Safari the browser's own HEIC support is used and nothing extra is loaded.

JPG is the default because it is what forms and old software expect; 92% quality keeps the photo visually identical to the original at roughly the same size Apple would produce with 'Most Compatible'. Choose PNG when you want a lossless copy — no further compression is applied, so every pixel the decoder produces is kept — or WebP for the smallest files on a website. Orientation is handled by the decoder, so portrait shots come out upright; Live Photos and burst containers yield the primary still. Results show the original and new size, download individually or as a ZIP, and the settings are remembered on this device.

How to use it

Get the HEIC files onto the computer first — AirDrop, a cable, iCloud Drive or a chat app that sends originals (many messaging apps convert to JPG on the way and strip quality). Drag them onto the drop zone, click to browse, or paste. Pick the output format; leave quality at 92% for a faithful JPG, lower it to 75–80% if you need small files for a form with a 2 MB limit. Each file is converted in turn — a 12-megapixel photo takes about a second on a laptop, two to three on a phone — and appears in the list with its size. Download one file, or all of them as a ZIP.

The converted photos can be handed straight to the image compressor to hit a byte target, the resizer for a fixed width, or image to PDF to bundle a scanned document — no re-selecting files. If you also need to change the format of ordinary JPG or PNG files, the general image converter handles every other direction.

Common pitfalls

A file named .HEIC on Windows may show a broken thumbnail even though it is fine — that is Windows lacking the HEVC decoder, not a corrupt file; this tool does not depend on it. Files that were exported from Photos as 'Most Compatible' are already JPG and need no conversion. Converting to JPG is lossy: 92% is visually identical, but do not convert, edit and re-convert repeatedly; keep the HEIC originals, which are both smaller and higher quality. Choosing PNG makes files three to five times larger than the HEIC and adds no quality — use it only when a lossless copy is required.

Depth maps, HDR gain maps and the video half of a Live Photo are not carried into JPG; only the main still image is. Photos taken in 10-bit HDR are converted to standard 8-bit colour, which is what every JPG viewer expects. EXIF metadata (camera, lens, GPS location) is not copied into the output — for sharing that is usually a benefit, but if you rely on capture dates for sorting, keep the originals. Very large batches on a phone are limited by memory; convert in groups of twenty or thirty.

Background: what HEIC actually is

HEIC is a container defined by the MPEG-H Part 12 standard (HEIF, High Efficiency Image File Format, 2015) holding images compressed with the HEVC/H.265 video codec. Apple adopted it as the default camera format in iOS 11 in September 2017 because it stores a photo in roughly half the bytes of JPEG at equal quality, and can carry extras JPEG cannot: depth maps for portrait mode, the frames of a Live Photo, 10-bit HDR colour and lossless edits. The catch is that HEVC is patent-encumbered, so Windows ships without a decoder (Microsoft sells the 'HEVC Video Extensions' separately), many Android devices only decode what their chipset supports, and browsers other than Safari have never added support.

That is why 'HEIC to JPG' is one of the most searched conversion tasks: the format is excellent inside the Apple ecosystem and awkward everywhere else. Decoding here uses libheif, the open-source HEIF library (LGPL) used by GIMP, ImageMagick and many Linux desktops, together with the libde265 HEVC decoder, both compiled to WebAssembly. Encoding to JPG uses MozJPEG and to PNG the lossless OxiPNG pipeline shared by all image tools on this site.

Where HEIC conversion is needed

Uploading iPhone photos to a website that only accepts JPG or PNG — job portals, government forms, insurance claims, marketplaces, university applications; sending photos to a Windows PC or an Android user who sees a grey box; inserting pictures into Word, PowerPoint or older versions of Photoshop and Lightroom; attaching a photo of a receipt or document to an email that the recipient's client cannot preview; publishing to a blog or CMS whose image pipeline rejects HEIC; and archiving family photos in a format that will still open in twenty years.

A typical flow on this site: convert HEIC to JPG here, then compress or resize for the web, crop a square avatar, or gather the pages of a photographed contract into a single file with image to PDF. Screenshots from an iPhone are already PNG and do not need this tool.

Frequently asked questions