HEIC to JPG
Your photos never leave this device
HEIC is what an iPhone saves a photo as unless you tell it otherwise. It holds the same picture in roughly half the space of a JPEG, but plenty of Windows software and most upload forms still cannot open one, and no non-Apple browser can read it at all. Converting to JPEG trades that efficiency for a format nothing refuses.
How to convert HEIC files
Why only Safari can open these
HEIC is a HEIF container, standardised as ISO/IEC 23008-12, wrapping an image coded with HEVC, the video codec also known as H.265. HEVC is heavily patented and its licensing is split across more than one pool with overlapping claims and separate fees. A browser vendor shipping a decoder to hundreds of millions of users would be paying for that, and Chrome, Firefox and Edge have declined to. Apple already licenses HEVC for its own hardware, so Safari can hand a HEIC to the operating system and get pixels back.
That is why this page works in Safari on a Mac or an iPhone and says plainly that it cannot in Chrome. The alternative would be shipping a WebAssembly HEVC decoder, which is a couple of megabytes downloaded by every visitor including the ones who did not need it. Using the decoder the device already has costs nothing and works for the people whose photos these mostly are.
What is in a HEIC that a JPEG cannot hold
More than the picture. An iPhone HEIC can carry ten bits per colour channel where baseline JPEG carries eight, so a sunset gradient has four times as many steps available before it starts to band. It can hold a depth map, which is what portrait mode uses to adjust the background blur after the shot. It can hold auxiliary images, alternative exposures from a bracket, and the paired video that makes a Live Photo move. None of that survives the conversion. What comes out is a single eight-bit still, which is all a JPEG has ever been.
The metadata goes too
The photo is decoded and redrawn from its pixels, so the output carries no EXIF at all: no camera model, no capture date, no lens, no GPS coordinates. Depending on why you are here that is either a loss or the whole point. The one piece of EXIF that does not simply vanish is the orientation flag, because the browser applies it while decoding, so a photo shot in portrait is stored in portrait rather than sideways with a note attached that some viewers honour and others ignore.
What people use it for
- Getting iPhone photos into a form or portal that rejects anything but JPEG
- Sending photos to someone whose mail client shows a HEIC as an unopenable attachment
- Turning a photographed document into a file an older scanner workflow will accept
- Dropping the GPS coordinates out of a photo before it goes anywhere
- Getting a photo into an older editor or a printing kiosk that has never heard of HEIC
- Salvaging a batch shot before someone remembered to change the camera format
Questions
Because Chrome, Firefox and Edge ship no HEIC decoder. Open the page in Safari on a Mac or an iPhone, or set your iPhone to shoot JPEG in the first place.
Settings, Camera, Formats, then choose Most Compatible. New photos are saved as JPEG; existing ones stay as they are.
A little, because JPEG re-encodes. At quality 90 the difference is not visible at normal viewing sizes, and the file will be roughly twice the size of the HEIC.
It is dropped. The photo is redrawn from its pixels, so every piece of EXIF metadata, GPS coordinates included, is left behind.
No. The orientation flag is applied while the file is decoded, so the JPEG is stored the way the photo was shot rather than relying on a viewer to rotate it.
You get the still frame. The short video paired with it lives alongside the image in the container and has nowhere to go in a JPEG.
The blur you can see is baked into the image and comes across. The depth map that makes it adjustable does not, so the JPEG is the shot as rendered and cannot be re-edited.
HEIF is the container format; HEIC is the name for a HEIF file whose images are coded with HEVC. Files with a .heif extension can hold other codecs entirely.
For a photograph, no. PNG would store the same picture losslessly at several times the size with nothing gained, since the detail was already discarded when the HEIC was written.
It sets the JPEG quality between 40 and 100, starting at 90. Below about 70 you will see the eight-by-eight block structure in skies and flat colour.
No. Everything happens in this page, which for holiday photographs is rather the point.