The HEIC format
HEIC is what your iPhone has been saving photos as since 2017. It stores roughly the same picture as a JPEG in about half the space, with better colour and real transparency — and it is the format most likely to be refused by whatever you are trying to hand it to. Both halves of that are worth understanding before you convert anything.
HEIC at a glance
- Introduced
- 2015 · MPEG (HEVC) / Apple
- File extensions
- .heic, .heif
- MIME type
- image/heic
- Compression
- Lossy
- Transparency
- Yes, with soft edges
- Animation
- Yes
- Colour depth
- 10 bits per channel
- Wide gamut
- Yes
- High dynamic range
- Yes
- Maximum dimension
- No practical limit
- Support
- Narrow — expect it to be rejected
Lean Image reads HEIC but cannot write it.
Where it came from
HEIC is the still-image half of a bet the video industry made. HEVC — H.265 — was designed to halve the bitrate of H.264 for streaming, and the people who built it noticed that a video codec’s intra-frame compression is also, on its own, an extremely good still-image compressor. HEIF wraps that in a container borrowed from the MP4 family, and HEIC is HEIF carrying HEVC frames.
Apple shipped it as the iPhone default in iOS 11, in 2017, and did so because the arithmetic was overwhelming: the same photo library at half the size, on devices sold with fixed storage. Every iPhone since has been producing HEIC unless someone changed the setting.
Why it fails outside Apple’s world
HEVC decoding is patent-licensed, and the licence is not free. Apple pays it; Microsoft does not, and instead sells the HEVC Video Extensions package in the Microsoft Store for a nominal sum. The result is that a stock Windows install cannot open a HEIC at all — the Photos app shows an error, Explorer shows no thumbnail, and file-upload dialogs treat it as an unknown binary.
Browsers are much the same. Safari displays HEIC because macOS and iOS have the system decoder; Chrome and Firefox do not. That distinction is visible in this tool: on Safari a HEIC is decoded by the browser itself, and everywhere else a WebAssembly build of libheif is downloaded to do it — about a megabyte and a half, fetched only when you actually open a HEIC.
What it can do that JPEG cannot
Four things, and they are real rather than marketing:
- 10 bits per channel instead of 8, which is what keeps a sunset gradient smooth rather than banded.
- Wide colour — iPhone photos are Display P3, not sRGB, and the difference shows up in saturated reds and greens. This tool converts that to sRGB properly on the way out, which is why a converted photo looks right rather than washed out.
- Real transparency, with soft edges, which JPEG has never had.
- More than one image per file — burst frames, the depth map behind portrait mode, thumbnails, Live Photo stills.
That last one is the source of most surprises. A HEIC is a container, and what you see in Photos is the primary image inside it. Everything else is discarded when you convert, because a JPG or a PNG has nowhere to put it.
What to convert it to
If something rejected the file, JPG. It is the format with no compatibility question attached, and every device made in the last thirty years opens it. Expect the file to roughly double in size.
If you want to keep the quality and the file small and it is headed for the web, AVIF. It is built on the same generation of compression technology as HEIC — AV1 rather than HEVC — reaches similar sizes, and unlike HEIC it opens in every current browser. It is the closest thing to a like-for-like replacement.
If you need transparency preserved exactly, or the image is going into an editor, PNG. It will be much larger, and it will be pixel-exact.
Convert a HEIC into something else
Converting to HEIC
There is no HEIC encoder here, and these pages explain why rather than pretending otherwise.
Questions about HEIC
Is HEIC the same thing as HEIF?
Almost. HEIF is the container format; HEIC is HEIF holding HEVC-encoded images specifically. Apple uses the .heic extension, and .heif turns up occasionally from other software. This site treats them as the same thing, and /heif-to-jpg redirects to /heic-to-jpg.
Is HEIC better than JPEG?
Technically, comfortably — about half the size at matched quality, 10 bits per channel instead of 8, wide colour, real transparency, and multiple images per file. Practically, it depends entirely on whether the software you need it in can open it, which very often it cannot.
Why can I not convert something to HEIC here?
Because writing HEIC means encoding HEVC, and HEVC encoding is covered by active patent pools that charge per-unit royalties. There is no free encoder a web tool can legally ship, so rather than half-implement it we do not offer it and say why.
Does converting a HEIC lose my Live Photo?
Yes. The extra frames, the depth map and any auxiliary images live alongside the primary photo in the HEIC container, and a single-image format has nowhere to put them. Only the main picture converts.
How do I stop my phone producing HEIC?
Settings › Camera › Formats › Most Compatible switches the camera to JPEG. You give up roughly half your storage efficiency and any HDR capability, so it is a trade rather than a fix — but it is the right one if your photos end up on a Windows machine every day.
Work with a HEIC file
Drop one in and see what comes out, without uploading anything.