HEIC to JPG Converter

Convert HEIC photos from an iPhone into JPG files any device can open

You AirDropped or emailed a batch of photos from an iPhone, opened them on a Windows PC, and got a grey box, an "unsupported file" dialog, or nothing at all. The photos are fine. The container is the problem: since iOS 11, iPhones save camera photos as HEIC, and a lot of the software people actually use — older Windows builds, print kiosks, insurance claim portals, court filing systems, school upload forms, most CRMs — has never learned to read it. This tool decodes the HEIC file in your browser and re-encodes the picture as a JPG (or a PNG, if you prefer), so you get a file that opens everywhere without installing a codec, paying Microsoft for an extension, or signing up for anything.

Drop the files onto the upload area or click to browse. The picker is filtered to .heic and .heif, and the tool double-checks each file by extension and MIME type, so a stray PNG dragged in with the batch is rejected rather than silently mangled. Press Convert, then download each result individually or use Download All.

Why iPhones use HEIC in the first place

HEIC is a High Efficiency Image File Format container holding an image encoded with HEVC (H.265) — the same codec family used for video. JPEG's compression dates from a time when the encoder had to be cheap enough to run on a chip in a point-and-shoot camera. HEVC is far more sophisticated: bigger, variable-size prediction blocks, better intra-frame prediction, better entropy coding. The result is a photo that looks the same as a JPEG at a noticeably smaller file size, which matters a great deal when the phone has a fixed amount of storage and you take a lot of photos.

Apple also uses the container for things JPEG simply cannot hold. A single .heic file can carry multiple images plus metadata describing how they relate to each other. That is what makes Live Photos, burst sequences, portrait-mode depth maps, and non-destructive edits possible inside one file. It is a genuinely better format. It is also, outside the Apple ecosystem, frequently unreadable.

The licensing problem, in plain terms

HEVC is patent-encumbered. That is the real reason support is patchy rather than any technical difficulty: shipping a decoder means dealing with patent pools, and many vendors decided not to. Microsoft's HEIF support in Windows depends on the HEVC Video Extensions from the Microsoft Store, which is not installed by default on every machine. Plenty of image editors, content management systems, and web upload forms reject the format outright because their server-side image library was never built with it. JPEG has no such encumbrance, which is exactly why it remains the universal safe answer.

What survives the conversion, and what does not

This is the part most converter pages skip, and it is the part that determines whether you should convert at all. A HEIC file can contain much more than one picture. A JPG holds exactly one picture. Anything the container was carrying that JPG has no slot for is gone from the output file — not corrupted, just not represented.

Orientation and EXIF: read this before converting evidence or archives

The conversion runs through the browser's decoder and canvas pipeline, which produces pixels, not a metadata-preserving copy. Practically, that means the EXIF block does not carry across: the capture timestamp, camera and lens model, exposure settings, and any embedded GPS coordinates are not written into the JPG. Treat the output as a picture, not as a record.

For most people that is either irrelevant or actively welcome. Stripping GPS coordinates before you post a photo of your house to a marketplace listing or send it to a stranger is a privacy win, not a loss. But if you are converting photos for an insurance claim, a legal matter, a property survey, or a genealogy archive where the capture date is the point, keep the original .heic files. Convert copies for sharing and keep the originals for the record.

Orientation is the flip side of the same fact. HEIC files from a phone held sideways often store the image in one orientation with a rotation flag telling the viewer how to display it. Because the conversion works from the decoded, displayed image rather than raw stored pixels, photos come out the way up they appeared on your phone — the rotation is applied rather than passed along as a flag that some other program might ignore. If a converted photo looks rotated to you, the fastest check is to open the original on the phone and see which way up it appears there.

Choosing your output settings

The settings panel appears once you have added files. Two controls:

• Output format — JPEG or PNG. JPEG is the right answer for photographs and the reason you are almost certainly here. PNG is lossless and much larger; pick it only if the image is a screenshot, a graphic with flat colour, or something you intend to edit repeatedly.
• Quality — a slider from 50% to 100%, defaulting to 92%. It applies to JPEG only and is disabled when PNG is selected, because PNG has no quality dial to turn.

What the quality number actually buys you

JPEG quality is not a percentage of anything visible; it scales the quantization tables that decide how aggressively fine detail is thrown away. The useful mental model is that the top of the range costs a lot of bytes for very little visible gain, and the bottom of the range saves bytes you will regret.

Two practical notes. First, converting from HEIC to JPEG at any quality is a lossy step applied to an already-lossy source, so detail lost here is not recoverable — keep the originals until you are sure the output is what you want. Second, the JPG will frequently be larger than the HEIC it came from, sometimes substantially. That is not a bug. HEVC compresses better than JPEG, so encoding the same picture as JPEG costs more bytes. If a size increase pushes you over an upload limit, drop the quality slider to 80–85% rather than looking for a different tool.

Batches, limits, and what to expect

You can add as many files as you like in one go, and add more later without clearing the list. Conversion runs one file at a time so a large batch does not stall the tab, with a progress bar showing which file is in flight. Each converted file shows its original size, its new size, and the percentage change, so you can see immediately whether your quality setting is producing sensible output before you commit to the whole batch.

• Per-file limit: 50 MB. If any file in your selection is bigger, the tool tells you how many were oversized and refuses that batch. Ordinary iPhone photos are nowhere near this; ProRAW captures can be.
• No total limit other than the memory your browser has available. Very large batches on a low-memory device are better done in chunks of a few dozen.
• Download All saves each file separately with a short pause between them rather than building a ZIP. Your browser will very likely ask for permission to download multiple files — allow it, or the batch stops after the first one. Check your Downloads folder before assuming a file failed.
• Failures are per-file. One unreadable file marks itself as failed with its error message and the rest of the batch continues.
• Output filenames keep the original name with the extension swapped, so IMG_4821.HEIC becomes IMG_4821.jpg.

Common problems

• "Please select HEIC or HEIF image files." — nothing in your selection matched. The usual cause is that the photos were already converted on the way out of the phone. AirDrop to a Mac, and some email and messaging apps, silently convert to JPEG in transit, so what landed on your PC may already be a JPG despite what you expected.
• A file fails to convert — most often a truncated download or an incomplete cloud sync. Re-copy that file from the source and try again.
• Very large batches feel slow — HEVC decoding is genuinely heavy work and it is happening on your own CPU. This is the trade for not uploading your photos anywhere.
• The photo looks right but the date is wrong in Windows Explorer — expected. With no EXIF in the output, file managers fall back to the file creation date, which is today.

Your photos are not uploaded anywhere

This matters more for camera-roll photos than for almost any other kind of file, so it is worth being precise. The conversion is done entirely inside your browser tab. The HEIC decoder is a WebAssembly library loaded into the page on first use; your files are read from disk by the page, decoded in memory, and re-encoded in memory. No file is transmitted to this site or to any third party, and nothing needs to be deleted afterwards because nothing was ever stored. You can verify it: open your browser's developer tools, switch to the Network tab, and convert a file — you will see the decoder library download once, and no upload of your image.

The practical consequences are that the tool works with your network disconnected once the page has loaded, there is no queue and no per-day cap, and photos of your family, your home, your medical documents, or your client's site never sit in someone else's storage bucket waiting on a retention policy.

Stopping the problem at the source

If you convert iPhone photos regularly, change the camera setting instead. On the iPhone: Settings → Camera → Formats → Most Compatible. New photos are captured as JPEG from then on. Existing photos in your library stay HEIC — the setting is not retroactive.

There is a second setting worth knowing about, under Settings → Photos, at the bottom under Transfer to Mac or PC. Set it to Automatic and the phone converts to JPEG when copying to a computer that would struggle with HEIC; set it to Keep Originals and you get the untouched .heic files. If photos arrive on your PC in a format you did not expect, this setting is usually why.

Keeping "High Efficiency" on and converting copies when you need them is the better default for most people: you keep the storage savings and the depth and Live Photo data on the phone, and only spend a lossy conversion on the specific photos you actually need to hand to someone else.