Convert HEIC to JPG — open your iPhone photos anywhere
Drop a HEIC photo below and get a JPG that opens on Windows, Android, and every website in a single click. Decoding runs in your browser — your photos are never uploaded.
Your file is processed entirely in your browser. Nothing is uploaded.
HEIC is what your iPhone has been saving photos as since iOS 11 shipped in 2017. Apple switched the camera default to "High Efficiency", which writes an HEVC-compressed image inside a HEIF container and cuts the file size roughly in half compared to the JPG the same shot used to produce. On the phone this is excellent — twice as many photos in the same storage, with no visible quality difference. The problem starts the moment the photo leaves the Apple ecosystem: you email it to a colleague on Windows, drag it into a job application form, or attach it to an insurance claim, and the other side gets an error instead of an image.
This converter decodes HEIC with libheif, the reference open-source HEIF implementation, compiled to WebAssembly and executed inside a Web Worker in your browser. That is genuinely the only way to read HEIC outside Apple’s ecosystem without installing software, because no browser other than Safari ships a native HEIC decoder. Once the photo is decoded, the pixels are re-encoded as JPG at the quality you choose on the slider. Nothing is uploaded and nothing is logged. The first conversion takes a second or two while the decoder downloads; after that it is cached and the next photos convert almost instantly.
How to convert HEIC to JPG in 4 steps
- 1
Select your HEIC photo
Drop the .heic file into the dropzone above, or click to browse. Photos straight off an iPhone or iPad work as-is, including files with the .heif extension that some tools produce.
- 2
Pick a JPG quality
The default of 85 is visually indistinguishable from the source on phone photos. Raise it to 95 when the JPG will be printed or re-edited, lower it to 70 when you need the smallest possible email attachment.
- 3
Let the decoder run
libheif works in a background worker so the page stays responsive. A 12-megapixel iPhone photo typically decodes and re-encodes in one to three seconds on a modern device.
- 4
Download your JPG
Click download and use the file anywhere. Your original HEIC is untouched, and no copy of either file was sent to a server at any point.
HEIC vs JPG: what actually changes?
HEIC stores a still image compressed with HEVC (H.265) inside a HEIF container. HEVC was designed for video in 2013, two decades after JPG’s 1992 block-based DCT, and the generational gap shows: the same perceived quality in roughly half the bytes, 10-bit colour depth instead of 8-bit, support for transparency, and the ability to hold several images in one file — which is how Live Photos, burst sequences, and Portrait mode depth maps are stored. JPG holds exactly one 8-bit image with no transparency and no metadata beyond EXIF. So why convert to the weaker format? Licensing and reach. HEVC carries patent royalties, which is precisely why Windows sells the HEVC codec extension in the Microsoft Store and why Android support arrived late and unevenly. JPG is royalty-free and has been readable by every device on earth for over thirty years. At matched visual quality, converting will roughly double your file size; drop the quality slider and you can claw most of that back, at the cost of some detail. Either way you end up with a photo that opens absolutely everywhere. One thing to keep in mind: the conversion flattens the extras. Live Photo motion, depth maps, and burst frames cannot be represented in JPG, so you keep the main still image and lose the rest.
When should you convert HEIC to JPG?
Sending photos to Windows or Android users
Windows 10 and 11 need a paid HEVC Video Extension from the Microsoft Store to open HEIC in Photos, and Android support varies by manufacturer and version. Sending JPG removes the problem entirely.
Uploading to a web form
Insurance claims, job applications, rental portals, marketplaces, and government e-services almost always validate uploads by extension and reject .heic outright. JPG passes every time.
Editing in older software
Photoshop CS6, older GIMP builds, and Lightroom versions from before 2018 have no HEIC support at all. Converting first is faster than fighting plugin installs.
Printing at a photo lab
In-store kiosks and online print services expect JPG or TIFF. Uploading a HEIC to a print order usually fails silently or produces a blank page.
Frequently asked questions
- Why are my iPhone photos HEIC instead of JPG?
- Because the Camera app defaults to "High Efficiency" since iOS 11. If you would rather never convert again, open Settings → Camera → Formats and pick "Most Compatible" — your iPhone will shoot JPG from then on, at roughly double the storage cost. Photos already taken stay in HEIC, so you will still need this tool for your existing library.
- Will I lose quality converting HEIC to JPG?
- A little, and at quality 85 or above it is imperceptible on photographs. Both formats are lossy, so the process decodes the HEIC and re-encodes as JPG, which adds one generation of compression loss. If the JPG is going to be edited further or printed large, set the slider to 95 and the loss becomes irrelevant.
- How much bigger will the JPG be?
- It depends entirely on the quality you pick. At 95, expect roughly 1.5 to 2.5 times the HEIC size, because HEVC compresses far better than JPG at matched quality. At the default of 85 the two often land in the same ballpark, and the JPG can even come out smaller — though that is because you are compressing harder, not because JPG caught up. The exact before-and-after sizes appear under the download button and update every time you move the slider.
- Does this work with Live Photos and Portrait mode shots?
- The main still image converts correctly, which is what you see when you open the photo. The extra data an iPhone stores alongside it — the short motion clip of a Live Photo, the depth map behind Portrait mode blur, the other frames of a burst — is not carried into the JPG, because JPG has no way to represent any of it.
- Are my photos uploaded to a server?
- No. libheif runs as WebAssembly inside your browser and the re-encoding uses your device’s own Canvas engine. Your photos never leave your machine, which matters more here than for almost any other file type — personal photo libraries are exactly the kind of content you should not be handing to an anonymous conversion site.