Turn HEIC photos
into JPGs.

What is a HEIC file?

HEIC is the format iPhones and iPads use for photos when the camera is set to High Efficiency. The name comes from HEIF (High Efficiency Image File Format), a container, and HEVC (also called H.265), the video codec used to compress the picture inside it. The result is usually a much smaller file than a JPG of similar quality. That’s why Apple uses it by default.

Larger iPhone photos are stored as a grid of tiles that are decoded separately and joined back together. The file can also carry a colour profile, rotation instructions, camera details, the date and often the location where the photo was taken.

Why convert HEIC to JPG?

HEIC is well supported on Apple devices, but not everywhere else. Some websites, upload forms, older Windows software, photo printing services and workplace systems refuse it or show a blank preview. JPG opens in almost every app, browser and device, so converting a copy is the simplest way to share a photo with anyone.

If you’d rather avoid HEIC altogether, iPhone offers two settings. Settings › Camera › Formats › Most Compatible takes new photos as JPG. Settings › Photos › Transfer to Mac or PC › Automatic converts photos when you copy them to a computer over a cable. Neither changes photos you already have, which is where this converter helps.

What happens to quality, colour and orientation

Converting re-compresses the picture as a JPG. At the default 90% quality the difference is hard to see. Lower settings make smaller files at the cost of fine detail. A JPG is usually larger than the HEIC it came from; that’s normal, not a fault.

iPhones record colour in Display P3, a wider range than standard sRGB. Where your browser supports wide colour, the JPG keeps it and embeds a Display P3 colour profile, and the result card says “Wide colour (Display P3) kept”. If a photo uses a colour profile that browsers can’t reproduce exactly, the card says the colour was approximated.

Rotation and mirroring stored in the HEIC are applied to the pixels, so the JPG is the right way up everywhere. HDR brightness information and any extra images in the file, such as depth maps, are not converted. For a Live Photo, only the still photo is converted.

Which browsers can convert HEIC?

This page doesn’t download a HEIC decoder. It uses the one built into your browser or device:

• Safari on Mac, iPhone and iPad decodes HEIC itself.
• Chrome and Edge on most Macs, and on Windows PCs and Android devices with HEVC support, use the device’s built-in HEVC decoder. On Windows this can depend on Microsoft’s HEVC Video Extensions and the graphics hardware.
• Firefox doesn’t currently decode HEIC, and many Linux systems lack an HEVC decoder.

If your browser can’t, this page says so before you choose a photo, and there’s still a way. Open this page in Safari on your Mac, iPhone or iPad. JPEG, PNG and WebP images convert in any modern browser: here when your browser can read HEIC, and always with the WebP to JPG and PNG to JPG converters, which accept all three.

Your photos stay on your device

Everything happens in your browser. Photos are read and converted in memory on your device, one at a time, and the converted copies are saved straight to your downloads. Nothing is uploaded, and closing the page discards the results. Not sure whether a file is really a photo? The file type checker identifies it from its contents, and our guide explains how to identify an unknown file.