HEIC → JPG

Convert HEIC to JPG
(No Upload)

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Drag & drop your HEIC file here

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Turn iPhone photos into JPGs that open on any device. Nothing is uploaded, and there is no watermark.

About HEIC to JPG

A .heic file is a photo in the High Efficiency Image Format, which every iPhone has produced by default since iOS 11. It stores a picture at roughly half the size of the equivalent JPEG at the same quality, which is genuinely clever and saves a lot of space on your phone.

It is also the reason you are here. The moment a HEIC photo leaves an Apple device it tends to stop working: Windows shows a grey placeholder or asks you to buy a codec from the Microsoft Store, older versions of Photoshop refuse it, most Android phones cannot preview it, and plenty of upload forms reject it outright. Converting to .jpg makes the photo open everywhere, at the cost of a larger file.

What actually changes in the photo

HEIC and JPEG are both lossy formats, so a conversion decodes the picture and encodes it again. In practice the difference is very hard to see, and this page encodes at a high quality setting to keep it that way. What is worth knowing is what does not survive:

  • The file gets bigger, usually around twice the size. That is the trade you are making. JPEG is a much older format and simply does not compress as efficiently.
  • Transparency is not kept. JPEG cannot store it. Very few camera photos have transparency, so this rarely matters, but if it does, convert to PNG instead.
  • Live Photos become a single still. The short video an iPhone attaches is a separate part of the file and cannot go into a JPEG. You get the photo, not the motion.
  • Depth maps and burst frames are dropped. A HEIC can hold several images and the extra data Portrait mode uses. The main photo is what you get.

How this converts HEIC without uploading it

Browsers cannot decode HEIC on their own. Safari can, because Apple ships the system decoder, but Chrome, Edge and Firefox cannot, which is exactly the situation of the Windows user who was sent a photo from an iPhone.

To avoid uploading anything, this page carries its own decoder: libheif, the standard open source HEIC library, compiled to WebAssembly so it runs inside your browser tab at close to native speed. It is about 1.4 MB and is only fetched the first time you actually drop a HEIC file in, so nobody converting other formats pays for it. A 12 megapixel iPhone photo decodes in well under a second.

Stopping your iPhone from making HEIC files

If you would rather not convert photos repeatedly, the phone can produce JPEGs directly. Open Settings, then Camera, then Formats, and choose Most Compatible. New photos will be JPEG from then on, taking about twice the storage. Existing photos stay HEIC.

Separately, under Settings, Photos, scroll to Transfer to Mac or PC and choose Automatic: iOS then converts photos to JPEG as it copies them over, which avoids the problem for anything you transfer by cable.

Nothing is uploaded

The conversion runs inside your own browser tab. Your file is read from your disk, converted by code already running on your machine, and written straight back out. It is never sent to a server, which means there is no queue to wait in, no upload progress bar, no account, no watermark, and nothing of yours sitting on someone else's hard drive afterwards. You can disconnect from the internet after the page loads and it will still work.

HEIC to JPG FAQ

Why will my HEIC photo not open on Windows?
Windows does not include a HEIC decoder by default. Windows 10 and 11 can play HEIC if you install Microsoft's HEIF Image Extensions, but part of that package has at times been a paid item in the Microsoft Store, which is why so many people convert instead. Converting to JPG sidesteps the issue permanently.
Does converting HEIC to JPG lose quality?
Slightly, in principle. Both formats are lossy, so the image is decoded and re-encoded. This page uses a high quality setting, and on a normal photo the difference is not visible at ordinary viewing sizes. The much more noticeable change is that the file roughly doubles in size, because JPEG compresses less efficiently than HEIC.
Will the photo lose its date, location or camera information?
Some of it. The image is decoded to pixels and re-encoded as a JPEG, so EXIF metadata such as GPS coordinates and camera settings is not carried across. If you specifically need to keep location data, use a desktop tool that copies EXIF between files. Many people consider dropping GPS data from a photo they are about to share an advantage rather than a loss.
Can I convert a Live Photo?
You get the still image from it. The short video clip an iPhone stores alongside a Live Photo cannot be represented inside a JPEG, so it is not included in the result.
Is there a limit on photo size or how many I can convert?
There is no imposed limit and no daily cap, because nothing is being uploaded and there is no server cost to ration. Very large images do need memory to hold their pixels while converting, since any raster conversion needs width times height times four bytes regardless of how small the compressed file is, but ordinary phone photos are nowhere near that.
Are my photos uploaded to a server?
No. The decoder runs inside your browser on your own device, and your photos never leave it. This matters more for photos than for most files, since a camera roll is about as personal as data gets.

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