heic → jpg
HEIC to JPG, without handing over your photos
Your iPhone saves pictures as HEIC. Windows will not preview them, plenty of upload forms reject them, and older editors have never heard of the format. This turns them into JPG or PNG on your own machine.
Files are processed on your device · nothing is uploaded, stored or logged
How it works
Pick your file. The browser opens it straight from disk. There is no upload, so there is nothing to wait for.
The decoder loads once. HEIC is the one image format browsers cannot read on their own, so a small build of libheif is fetched the first time. It is cached afterwards.
Your machine does the work. The photo is decoded, drawn to a canvas and written out as JPG or PNG.
Save the result. The file goes straight to your downloads folder and the original is untouched.
Why Apple used a format nothing else reads
HEIC is a container built on HEVC, the same compression family as modern video. It stores a photograph at roughly half the size of an equivalent JPEG, which across a camera roll of several thousand pictures is a real saving. That is why Apple made it the default in 2017.
The cost lands everywhere outside Apple's own software. Windows needs a paid codec from the Microsoft Store before File Explorer will even show a thumbnail. Web upload forms tend to filter by extension and reject the file outright. Print services, job portals and older photo editors have no idea what it is. JPEG remains the format that everything accepts, which is why this conversion keeps being needed.
Getting a real HEIC off the phone
If your file arrives as a JPG when you expected HEIC, the phone converted it in transit. Email and messaging apps do this by default. Choose Actual Size when sharing, or copy the photos across with a cable, and the original HEIC comes through intact.
Common questions
Why can Windows not open my HEIC files?
Windows needs a codec from the Microsoft Store to preview HEIC, and it is not installed by default. Converting to JPG sidesteps that entirely.
Will the photo lose quality?
Converting to JPG re-encodes the picture, so there is some loss, as there is with any HEIC to JPG conversion. At the High setting it is invisible at normal viewing size. Choose PNG if you want no loss at all.
Why is the first conversion slower?
The HEIC decoder is fetched once, then cached by the browser. Every conversion after that starts immediately.
Is the location data kept?
No. The photo is decoded to pixels and written out again, which drops the EXIF block along with the GPS coordinates your phone stored. Keep the original if you need that data.
My file will not open — why?
It is probably not HEIC any more. When you email or message a photo, an iPhone often converts it to JPG on the way out. Send it with Actual Size, or copy it off the phone with a cable.