Why your iPhone saves photos as HEIC and how to turn them into JPG
You send a photo from your iPhone to your computer and get a .HEIC file Windows cannot open. It is not broken: it is the format Apple has used since 2017.
3 minute read
What HEIC is and why Apple uses it
HEIC is an image format that compresses far better than JPG: the same photo takes roughly half the space at the same visible quality. On a 128 GB phone, that means twice as many photos.
The catch is compatibility. Windows will not open it out of the box, many websites reject it when you upload an image, and some editing software ignores it. So as soon as the photo leaves the Apple ecosystem, it usually needs converting.
How to convert HEIC to JPG
Open the conversion tool and drag your .HEIC files in. You can drop all the photos at once.
Check the output format is JPG. If you would rather keep more quality for printing, pick PNG instead.
Press Convert. Since everything happens in your browser, there is no waiting for photos to upload.
Download the result. If you converted several, grab them all together in a ZIP.
How to stop it happening again
If you would rather the iPhone stopped producing HEIC, you can change it in the phone settings:
- Open Settings and go to Camera.
- Tap Formats.
- Choose Most Compatible instead of High Efficiency.
From then on the iPhone saves as JPG directly. The trade-off is that photos will take nearly twice the space.
Is quality lost when converting?
Very little, but it is worth understanding why. Both HEIC and JPG are lossy, so converting means decompressing and compressing again. We default to a high quality setting so the difference is not visible to the naked eye.