What HEIC is, and why your photos are in it
Since iOS 11, iPhones save photos as HEIC (High Efficiency Image Container) by default. It stores the same picture as a JPG in roughly half the space, and it can hold things JPG can't: 10-bit colour, depth maps for Portrait mode, Live Photo frames and, on recent iPhones, HDR data.
The catch is compatibility. Windows needs an extra codec to open HEIC, many websites and upload forms reject it, older Android phones can't display it, and most online forms that ask for "a photo under 200 KB" expect a JPG. That's when you need to convert.
How the conversion works here
- Drop one or more
.heicor.heiffiles into the box above — a whole batch is fine. - Pick JPG (smaller, works everywhere) or PNG (lossless, larger).
- Download each file, or all of them as a single ZIP.
The decoding runs in your browser with a WebAssembly build of libheif, the same open-source decoder used by desktop apps. Your photos are never uploaded, which matters for HEIC more than most formats: iPhone photos usually carry the GPS location where they were taken.
Which iPhone photos convert, and which don't
| Photo | Converts? | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| Regular iPhone photo (iOS 11–17) | Yes | Most common case |
| HDR photo from iOS 18+ | Yes | Converted to standard-range JPG |
| Portrait mode | Yes | The depth map is dropped, the photo keeps its blur |
| Live Photo | Yes | You get the still frame; the short video isn't part of the HEIC |
| Burst | Yes | Each frame is its own file |
ProRAW (.dng) |
No | That's a different format, not HEIC |
JPG or PNG?
Choose JPG for almost everything: sharing, email, upload forms, printing. A 12 MP iPhone photo typically lands between 2 and 4 MB as JPG at high quality. Choose PNG only if you plan to keep editing the image and want no compression artefacts at all — expect files three to five times larger.
If the result is still too heavy for a form, run it through Compress Image or straight to a fixed size like 100 KB.
Common problems
- "The photo is rotated after converting." HEIC stores orientation separately; this converter applies it, so the JPG comes out upright. If another tool showed it sideways, that tool ignored the orientation flag.
- "Colours look slightly flatter." HDR photos from iOS 18 and later have to be mapped down to standard range for JPG. That's expected; the photo will look the same as it does on non-HDR screens.
- "I want to strip the location before sharing." Converting already re-encodes the image without the original metadata. To check exactly what's left, use the EXIF viewer, or remove metadata from any photo.
Stop iPhone from saving HEIC in the first place
On the iPhone: Settings → Camera → Formats → Most Compatible. New photos will be saved as JPG. Photos you already took stay HEIC — that's what this converter is for. Alternatively, Settings → Photos → Transfer to Mac or PC → Automatic makes the iPhone convert to JPG when you copy photos over a cable.