Convert HEIC to JPG
If Windows, an upload form, or a colleague has just refused your iPhone photo, this is why: since iOS 11 the camera saves HEIC by default, and most software outside Apple’s world cannot read it. Converting to JPG fixes that permanently. The file will get bigger — that is the trade — and it will open absolutely everywhere.
Nothing is uploaded. Every image stays in this browser tab —here is how that works.
Why this conversion exists at all
Apple switched the iPhone camera to HEIC in 2017 and, from inside the Apple ecosystem, it was seamless: Photos, AirDrop, Messages and macOS all read it, and everybody’s storage bill halved. From outside, it was not seamless at all. A HEIC arriving on a Windows desktop, in an older version of Photoshop, on a print kiosk, or in a web form’s file picker frequently produces nothing — no preview, no error worth reading, just a file that does not work.
That is the entire reason this page exists. You are almost certainly not here because you want a JPG. You are here because something wants a JPG.
What to set before you convert
The quality slider starts at 90 on this page rather than the site’s usual 80, and that is deliberate: these are photographs off a camera, and the extra ten points cost a modest amount of size for detail you might actually miss in skin tones and skies. Lower it if the destination is a chat app; leave it if the destination is a print or an archive.
If the photos are going somewhere with an upload limit — a job application, a forum, an email — set a max file size instead of touching quality at all. The encoder will find the highest quality that fits under your number, which is a better answer than guessing at the slider and checking the result.
Check the dimensions before you run a batch, because the default is not the original size. A modern iPhone photo is around 4,032 pixels across, and the panel starts at a 1920 × 1080 box with contain — so a landscape photo lands at 1440 × 1080 unless you say otherwise. That is the right default for a web page and the wrong one for anything you intend to print or crop into later, where the Original resize preset is what you want.
Doing a whole camera roll
Drop the entire selection in at once — the tool runs several images in parallel across your CPU cores and works through the queue, and there is no file-count limit because there is no server to impose one. Optimize All starts the run; when it finishes, Download → Download as ZIP gives you the lot in one archive.
Two practical notes for large batches. First, exporting from Photos on a Mac gives you the HEIC originals only if you choose Export Unmodified Original; the plain Export already converts to JPEG, in which case you do not need this page. Second, a hundred 12-megapixel photos is a few minutes of real work — the progress on each card is the honest state of it, not an animation.
Where the files actually go
Nowhere. Your photos are decoded, resized and re-encoded by JavaScript and WebAssembly running in this tab, and the result is handed straight back to your browser’s download folder. There is no upload step to opt out of and no account to delete afterwards.
This is worth being specific about on this page in particular, because iPhone photos are the most personal files most people convert, and they arrive carrying GPS coordinates. The EXIF block — including that location — is not copied into the JPG. If you want it kept, this is the wrong tool.
What changes when you convert HEIC to JPG
Transparent areas become white — Trade-off
The target format has no alpha channel at all, so transparency has to be resolved into a real colour before encoding. Anything see-through — a rounded logo corner, a cut-out product shot, a drop shadow fading to nothing — is composited onto white. If the image will sit on a dark background, that halo will be obvious, and PNG or WebP is the conversion you actually want.
Only the first frame is kept — Trade-off
The source can hold an animation and the output is a single still, so the first frame is converted and the rest are dropped. There is no warning at the point of use — the file simply stops moving — so if the motion mattered, a short muted MP4 or WebM is the format you are looking for, at a fraction of the size an animated GIF would be.
HDR is flattened to standard range — Trade-off
The source can describe highlights brighter than a normal screen shows; the target cannot. The image is tone-mapped down to standard dynamic range, which usually reads as slightly duller highlights and a flatter sky. Nothing is broken — it is the same picture, rendered for an ordinary display.
Wide-gamut colour is converted to sRGB — Trade-off
Phone cameras and scanners record colours outside what sRGB can express — the saturated reds and greens in particular. Those are converted rather than clipped, so the picture stays true, but the most intense colours land slightly inside where they were. The conversion is done properly and once; the alternative, leaving the numbers alone and dropping the profile, is what makes images look washed out.
10 bits per channel become 8 — Trade-off
The source stores finer gradations per colour channel than the output can hold. In practice this shows up in smooth gradients — a clear sky, a studio backdrop — where the extra precision was hiding the steps between shades. At 8 bits those steps can become faintly visible bands.
A second lossy pass compounds the first — Trade-off
Decoding a lossy image and re-encoding it lossily runs the whole trade again on pixels that already carry artefacts, and the encoder cannot tell the artefacts from the picture — so it spends bits preserving them. One pass at a sensible quality is far better than three at a high one. If you have the original, convert that instead.
JPEG opens absolutely everywhere — Benefit
This is the one format with no compatibility question attached: every browser, every phone, every photo frame, every twenty-year-old print kiosk. If something rejected your file and you are not sure why, JPEG is the answer that ends the conversation.
A HEIC can hold more than one image, and only the main one converts — Note
iPhone HEIC files routinely carry more than the photo you see — burst frames, a depth map, a thumbnail. The primary image is the one that converts; the rest are discarded, along with anything Live Photo–related, because a still image format has nowhere to put them.
Camera and location metadata are not carried over — Note
EXIF is dropped: the camera model, the exposure settings, the timestamp, and — the one that matters — the GPS coordinates of where the photo was taken. That is a privacy improvement for anything you are about to publish and a loss if you were relying on it for cataloguing. Orientation is the exception: it is applied to the pixels, so the image stays the right way up.
Output is sRGB — Note
Everything this tool writes is in sRGB, the colour space the web assumes. That is what makes the result look the same in a browser, a chat app and a photo viewer without an embedded profile to carry around.
Questions people ask about this conversion
Why will not Windows open my HEIC files?
Because HEIC stores its pixels as HEVC video frames, and HEVC decoding is patent-licensed. Microsoft ships Windows without the codec and sells the "HEVC Video Extensions" package separately, so a stock install shows a blank preview or an error rather than the photo.
Will converting to JPG make my photos worse?
Slightly, and almost certainly not visibly. The HEIC is already lossy, so this is a second lossy pass — but at quality 90, which is what this page starts at, the difference is not something you will find without pixel-peeping a flat area. What you will notice is the file size going up.
Why is the JPG bigger than the HEIC?
Because HEVC is a much newer and more efficient compressor than JPEG, which is essentially unchanged since 1992. Roughly double is normal. That is the price of a file every device on earth can open, and for most people it is worth paying.
What happens to Live Photos and portrait-mode depth?
They are dropped. A HEIC can hold a burst of frames, a depth map and an auxiliary image alongside the photo; a JPG holds one picture and nothing else. The still you see is what converts. Keep the originals if the Live Photo matters to you.
Can I stop my iPhone making HEIC files at all?
Yes. Settings › Camera › Formats › Most Compatible switches the camera to JPEG permanently. You lose about half your storage efficiency and any chance of HDR or 10-bit colour, which is why it is not the default — but if you move photos to a Windows machine daily, it is the right setting.
Related
Other things you can turn a HEIC into
Try it with your own file
Drop an image in and see the result before you download anything.