HEIC to JPG Converter

Convert the .heic photos your iPhone saves into ordinary JPGs, right here in your browser. Batch a whole camera roll, and nothing is ever sent to a server.

Your file is processed by your own browser and never uploaded. The engine itself is a one-time 1.4 MB download the first time you use it, and after that it comes out of your browser cache.

How to use HEIC to JPG

  1. 1Drop your .heic files onto the box above, or click it to pick them. Dozens at a time is fine.
  2. 2Each photo is decoded and written back out as a JPG. Adjust the quality if you want smaller files, then apply again.
  3. 3Download them one at a time, or take the whole batch as a single .zip.

Why your iPhone photos will not open

Since iOS 11, an iPhone saves photos as .heic rather than .jpg by default, which is why iPhone HEIC to JPG is the busiest conversion on this whole site. The format is genuinely good: at the same visible quality it lands around half the size of a JPEG, which is why Apple switched.

The trouble is what is inside. A HEIC file stores its pixels as an HEVC intra frame, which is to say a single video frame. HEVC comes with patent licensing, and Chrome and Firefox have never shipped a decoder for it. Windows asks you to buy an extension. The result is a photo that looks fine on the phone that took it and is rejected by a submission form, a printer, an older laptop, or a colleague on Windows.

To convert HEIC to JPG is to decode that frame and re-encode it as something everything on earth can read.

What changes, and what does not

The picture survives. Orientation survives, which matters more than it sounds: phones store rotation as a tag instead of turning the pixels, and a converter that ignores the tag is why people end up with sideways photos.

The file gets bigger, normally around double. HEIC is about twice as efficient as JPEG, so the same image needs more bytes once it is a JPG. Nothing has gone wrong; you have traded size for the ability to open it.

Some things are dropped, and it is worth knowing which. The HEIC container can carry more than one image: the short clip of a Live Photo, a depth map from portrait mode, an HDR gain map, or the siblings of a burst. A JPG has nowhere to put any of that. This tool takes the primary image, the one the Photos app shows you, and leaves the rest behind.

Keep the originals

Because HEIC is already lossy, making a JPG is a second round of lossy compression. At the default quality that is invisible at normal viewing size, and at a low quality setting it is not. Either way it is not reversible, so the sensible habit is to treat the JPG as the copy you hand out and keep the HEIC as the one you keep.

Where the work happens

On your own machine. The decoder is libheif compiled to WebAssembly, fetched once on your first file and then served from your browser cache, and it runs in a background thread so a folder of full-resolution photos does not freeze the page while it works. No photo is sent anywhere.

Frequently asked questions

Why can nothing open my HEIC files?
Because HEIC stores its pixels using HEVC, the video codec, and HEVC carries patent licensing that Chrome and Firefox have never taken on. Windows needs a paid extension for it. So the file is fine, but most software refuses to look at it, which is the entire reason this page exists.
Will the JPG be bigger than the HEIC?
Yes, usually about twice the size. That is not a fault in the conversion. HEIC is roughly twice as efficient as JPEG at the same visible quality, so the same photo simply costs more bytes once it is a JPG. You are buying compatibility with size.
Does the photo lose quality?
A little, and unavoidably. HEIC is already lossy, so writing a JPG is a second lossy pass over material that has been through one. At the default quality the difference is not visible at normal viewing size. If the photo matters, keep the HEIC as your original.
Do my portrait photos come out sideways?
No. Phones record orientation as a tag rather than by rotating the pixels, and a converter that ignores that tag is the usual cause of sideways holiday photos. The rotation is applied here before the JPG is written.
What happens to Live Photos and depth data?
The still image comes through and the extras do not. A HEIC container can also hold the short video of a Live Photo, a depth map from portrait mode, and an HDR gain map. A JPG has nowhere to put any of that, so it is dropped rather than silently mangled.

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