How to open and convert iPhone HEIC photos

You copy photos off an iPhone and Windows shows blank icons, or an upload form refuses the file. The culprit is the .heic extension.

What HEIC is

HEIC is the format iPhones use by default. It is genuinely good — a HEIC photo is roughly half the size of an equivalent JPEG — but it relies on a video compression standard with patent licensing attached, so many browsers and older programs cannot open it. Windows needs a paid codec extension to display HEIC files at all.

Three similar names get used interchangeably, which does not help:

• HEIF (High Efficiency Image File Format) is the container — the kind of file.
• HEVC, also called H.265, is the compression used inside it. It was designed for video, and it is the part with the patents.
• HEIC is Apple's name for a HEIF file compressed with HEVC. Files end in .heic, or occasionally .heif.

Convert HEIC to JPG

1. Open HEIC to JPG and add your .heic or .heif files — as many as you like.
2. Choose the output quality. 90 is a good default.
3. Press Convert and wait while each photo is decoded.
4. Download the JPGs individually or as a ZIP.

The first conversion takes a little longer because the HEIC decoder (a few megabytes) has to load; after that it is cached. The photos are decoded on your own device and are not uploaded.

Does converting lose quality?

A little, in theory, because both formats are lossy. At quality 90 the difference is not visible at normal viewing sizes. Do not be surprised that the JPG is larger than the HEIC — that is simply JPEG's older compression. If you need the files smaller, run them through Compress Image afterwards.

Keep the HEIC originals if you have room. They are the best version of the photo you will ever have, and a JPG made from a HEIC is a copy of a copy.

What a JPG cannot carry over

HEIC can hold things that JPEG simply has no place for:

• Live Photos. A Live Photo is a still image plus a short video clip stored alongside it. Converting gives you the still; the motion is a separate video file.
• Wide colour and HDR. iPhone photos can store a wider range of colour and extra highlight detail for HDR screens. A converted JPG may look slightly less vivid on such a screen; on an ordinary screen there is no visible difference.
• Depth information from Portrait mode, which lets the Photos app change the background blur later. A JPG keeps the blur as it looked, not the ability to change it.

For sending a photo to someone or uploading it to a form, none of this matters.

Opening HEIC without converting

• Mac: nothing to do. Preview and Photos have opened HEIC files since macOS High Sierra.
• Windows 10 and 11: the Photos app needs two add-ons from the Microsoft Store, HEIF Image Extensions and HEVC Video Extensions. The second one is the paid codec. If you only have a handful of photos, converting them is quicker.
• Android: recent versions open HEIC in the gallery and in Google Photos.
• Websites and upload forms: most still expect JPG or PNG, which is the usual reason to convert.

Let the iPhone convert for you

Two settings cover most everyday cases without any conversion tool. First, under Settings → Photos, scroll to “Transfer to Mac or PC” and choose Automatic: photos copied over a cable are then handed to the computer in a compatible format. Second, when you share photos by email or through many apps, the iPhone often converts them to JPG on the way out. HEIC files tend to escape when photos are copied some other way — through a cloud drive, a file manager or a backup — which is when you need a converter.

Stop your iPhone making HEIC files

On the iPhone, go to Settings → Camera → Formats and choose Most Compatible. New photos will be saved as JPGs. Photos you have already taken stay as HEIC, so convert those as above.

There is a cost. JPGs take roughly twice the storage, which adds up over thousands of photos, and the same switch changes the video format too — some of the highest-quality video modes are only available with High Efficiency selected. If storage is tight or you shoot a lot of video, leaving the camera on High Efficiency and converting the few photos you need to share is the better trade.

Before you share them

iPhone photos often include the location where they were taken. After converting, you can check and strip that with the EXIF Viewer and Remover — see how to remove location data from photos. To send several photos as one document, Image to PDF puts them into a single PDF.