Turn the HEIC an iPhone saved into a JPG that every PC, website and upload form accepts.
The iPhone picked a format that saves space; the rest of the world still asks for a JPG.
With iOS 11 Apple switched the camera to High Efficiency Image File, a photo stored with the HEVC codec instead of the JPEG one. At the same visual quality the file is roughly half the size, which is why a phone with 128 GB of storage still holds thousands of pictures. Apple's settings app is the only place that decision is visible; every photo you take arrives as a .heic unless you change it.
A HEIC is not a JPEG with a different extension: the pixels are HEVC, and plain Windows needs two add-ons from the Microsoft Store — the HEIF image extension and the HEVC video extension, the second of which is paid — before Explorer and Photos will draw the thumbnail. Older Windows releases never manage it at all, plenty of Android phones and photo apps refuse it, and an upload form that checks the file type answers "unsupported image" no matter how good the photo is.
JPEG has been readable on every screen since the 1990s: Windows, macOS, Android, iOS, cameras, printers, shop terminals, email clients and the oldest form on the internet. One conversion and the picture stops being a compatibility question, without buying a codec pack or hunting for a viewer that understands HEVC.
The photo itself survives untouched; the extras an iPhone wrapped around it do not.
A 12 megapixel photo comes out as 4032 x 3024, the same pixels the camera recorded, and a 48 megapixel one keeps all of them. Nothing is cropped, nothing is scaled down, and the width field stays empty unless you deliberately ask for a smaller copy.
iPhones rarely rotate the pixels; they store the sensor image plus a rotation flag. That flag is applied during the conversion, so a photo taken sideways or upside down arrives upright with its width and height already matching. What you saw in the Photos app is what lands on your desktop.
A HEIC can carry far more than one picture: the short video of a Live Photo, the depth map Portrait mode used, the frames of a burst, a small thumbnail. A JPG holds a single frame and none of that, so the press-and-hold motion disappears and the depth map cannot be used later to change the background blur. The rendered photo keeps the look it had on the phone — only the ability to re-edit it is lost — and only the main image of the file is ever converted.
The photo is decoded from HEVC and written once as JPEG, at quality 82 by default. Raise it to 90–95 for a photo that will be printed, or 75 for one that only has to survive an upload form. Camera model, lens, timestamps and GPS coordinates are not copied into the JPG, which also makes the result a little smaller and safer to send.
Three steps, no account, nothing to install.
Drag the .heic file onto the box, click to choose it, or paste it with Ctrl+V (Cmd+V on a Mac). Files up to 25 MB are accepted, and a .heif named the same way works too. Photos downloaded from iCloud or pulled out of a shared album behave exactly like ones taken on the phone.
JPG is already chosen. Touch the quality field only if you want a lighter or a more faithful copy, and leave the width empty to keep the original size. Nothing is enlarged and the aspect ratio is never changed.
The preview shows the result with both weights, so a surprising file size is visible before you save. One click downloads a .jpg named after the original photo, ready for a Windows PC, a website, a form or a print shop.
A few habits that save the next round of conversions.
If HEIC keeps getting in the way, open Settings → Camera → Formats → Most Compatible. From then on the camera records JPEG (and H.264 video) and every photo leaves the phone in a format everything opens. The trade is storage: the same photo takes roughly twice the space, so decide whether compatibility or capacity matters more to you.
Some upload fields accept JPG but stop at 2 MB, and a 48 megapixel photo can overshoot that. Instead of throwing the picture away, run the JPG through the JPG compressor: it trims the quality and, if you want, the width until the file fits.
JPG is the right answer for a photo, not for everything. A screenshot or a cut-out logo wants PNG, where the edges stay sharp and transparency survives — the image converter handles that and WebP, AVIF and ICO as well, and JPG to PNG is there for the opposite trip.
Yes. There is no account, no payment, no watermark on the JPG and no cap on how many files you convert. A short rate limit is the only restriction, and it exists so the service stays responsive for everybody.
A HEIC stores its pixels with the HEVC codec, and Windows only learned to read that through two Microsoft Store add-ons: the HEIF image extension and the paid HEVC video extension. Without them Explorer, Photos and many other programs show an error, older Windows versions cannot do it at all, and upload forms reject the type outright. A JPG has no such requirement.
Up to 25 MB per file and 50 megapixels per image, which covers every iPhone photo, including the 48 megapixel ones. If an upload is refused, set a width of 2000 px first: for a picture that is only going to be shared or posted, that is plenty and the JPG gets much smaller.
Files are processed on our server and not stored. The HEIC is decoded, converted and returned to your browser as a JPG; no account is involved and the download is the only copy that leaves the conversion.
Not yet — one photo per run for now, so a whole album means repeating the same three steps. If you have hundreds to do, the faster route is to change the iPhone setting to Most Compatible (Settings → Camera → Formats) or to export them as JPG from the Photos app on a Mac.
