Turn iPhone HEIC photos into JPG files that open anywhere. Free, instant, and your photos never leave your device.
Apple switched the iPhone camera to HEIC in 2017, with iOS 11. The format stores a photograph at roughly half the size of an equivalent JPG at the same visual quality, which is why Apple adopted it — it doubles how many pictures fit on a phone without anyone noticing a difference.
The trouble is that Apple adopted it and most of the rest of the computing world did not. HEIC relies on the HEVC video codec, which is covered by a thicket of patents, and the licensing made other companies reluctant to build it in. Windows still asks you to buy a codec from the Microsoft Store to open one. Most websites reject it. Plenty of printing shops cannot read it at all.
So you end up with a photo your phone displays perfectly and nothing else will touch — usually discovered at the worst moment, when a form has just refused your upload.
Upload forms are the most common place people hit this. Job applications, university portals, visa and passport systems and insurance claim forms very often accept only JPG and PNG. A HEIC is refused, and the error message rarely explains why, so people assume their photo is corrupt.
Windows is the next. A HEIC copied from an iPhone to a PC shows as a generic file icon, and Photos offers to sell you a codec. Many people never get past that screen.
Printing is the third. Hand a print shop a USB stick of HEIC files and you will usually get it straight back. The same applies to photo kiosks in pharmacies and supermarkets, which run old embedded software.
Email and messaging are a quieter failure. Some clients forward a HEIC as an unopenable attachment rather than showing it inline, so the recipient sees nothing and assumes you sent a blank message.
You can drop in as many files as you like and convert them in one pass. Because everything runs locally, there is no upload queue and no per-file wait — a folder of fifty photos finishes in roughly the time a server-based tool would still be uploading the first few.
The first file in a batch takes a few seconds longer than the rest. That is the decoder being fetched; once it is in memory the remaining files are quick.
Large photos take longer than small ones, and a modern iPhone shoots 12 to 48 megapixels, so give a big batch a moment. The page stays responsive while it works, and you can rename each output before you save it.
This matters more for HEIC than for most formats, because HEIC files are overwhelmingly personal photographs straight off someone’s phone. They are pictures of family, of documents, of identity papers. Most online HEIC converters work by sending that file to a server, converting it there and sending it back, which means your photograph sits on a stranger’s computer and you are trusting a deletion policy you have never read.
This page does the work inside your own browser instead. When your browser cannot decode HEIC on its own — Chrome and Firefox cannot, Safari can, because macOS and iOS decode it at the system level — the page downloads a decoder and runs it locally, on your machine. Your photo is read from your disk, decoded in memory and handed back as a download. It is never transmitted anywhere.
A practical consequence: once this page has loaded, it keeps working with your internet disconnected. That is a reasonable way to satisfy yourself that nothing is being sent.
Drop your .heic photos above and press Convert. Each one becomes a JPG you can download immediately, or take the whole batch as a ZIP.
HEIC is Apple’s format and support outside Apple devices is patchy. Windows needs a codec from the Microsoft Store, many websites reject it, and most print shops cannot read it. JPG opens everywhere.
Both HEIC and JPG are lossy, so re-encoding costs a little detail. At the default quality the difference is invisible at normal viewing sizes. Raise the slider to 100% if the photo will be printed large or edited further.
HEIC is about twice as efficient as JPG, so the same picture needs roughly double the space as a JPG. That is the format, not the conversion. Use the size target if you need to hit a specific limit.
No. Decoding and conversion both run inside your browser, so your photos never leave your device. The page keeps working with your internet disconnected.
Yes. Settings → Camera → Formats → Most Compatible switches the camera to JPG. You will use more storage, and photos already taken stay HEIC.