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HEIC to JPG

Private: your photos are decoded on your device, never uploaded

Drop a HEIC photo in to start. It is decoded here on your device.

iPhones save photos as HEIC, and almost nothing outside Apple will open one. Drop them here and get ordinary JPG, PNG or WebP files back. The decoding happens on your own device, so holiday photos and pictures of documents are never uploaded to anybody.

About HEIC and why nothing opens it

HEIC is the format an iPhone uses unless you tell it otherwise. It is genuinely good: roughly half the size of a JPEG at the same quality, because it compresses a still photo using HEVC, the same maths used for video. The catch is that almost nothing outside Apple's own software will open one. Windows asks you to buy a codec, most websites reject the upload, and half the print shops in the world hand the USB stick back.

So this converts them. Drop in as many as you like and get back files that open anywhere. If you would rather stop the problem at the source, on your phone go to Settings, Camera, Formats and choose Most Compatible, and new photos will be saved as JPEG from then on. Photos already taken stay HEIC, which is what this page is for.

Safari and some recent Android browsers can already read HEIC, and when yours can, the page uses that and downloads nothing extra. When it cannot, it fetches libheif, the reference decoder compiled to WebAssembly, once, and then works offline. libheif is free software under the LGPL version 3, and it is served unmodified from this site as its own separate file. Your photos still never leave your device: the library comes to them.

How to convert HEIC to JPG

  1. Drop your .heic photos on the box, or click to choose them. As many at once as you like.
  2. Pick a format. JPEG is what you want unless you have a reason otherwise.
  3. Set the quality. 90% is visually identical to the original for almost any photograph.
  4. Click a row to see that photo, and check it looks right.
  5. Press Download. One photo comes back as a file, several come back as one ZIP. A JPEG of the same picture is roughly twice the size of the HEIC, so compress the results if they are going somewhere with a limit.

Common questions about HEIC and JPG

Do my iPhone photos get uploaded to be converted?
No. The decoder runs inside this page, so your photos are read and converted on your own device and never sent anywhere. The only thing downloaded is the decoder itself, once, and it contains no part of your file. A camera roll is about as personal as a folder gets, so check rather than take our word for it: press F12, open the Network tab and convert a photo, and the only request you will see is for that decoder. Once it has been cached you can switch your connection off and convert the rest offline.

Does converting lose quality?
A little, and only at the second step. The HEIC is decoded exactly, pixel for pixel, and then written back out as JPEG, which is a lossy format. At 90% the difference is invisible on a photograph. Choose PNG if you want no loss at all, though the file will be several times larger, because PNG is built for graphics rather than photographs.

Why is the converted file bigger than the original?
Because HEIC really is about twice as efficient as JPEG. The same picture stored as JPEG needs roughly twice the bytes for the same quality, so a 2 MB HEIC becoming a 4 MB JPEG is the format working as designed, not a fault. Lower the quality slider if the size matters more than the last few percent of detail.

What happens to Live Photos and bursts?
A HEIC file can hold several pictures. The main one is converted and the page tells you when there were others, so you know they existed rather than wondering later. The short video attached to a Live Photo is stored separately by the phone and is not inside the HEIC at all, so it cannot be recovered here.

Is the location data carried over?
No. The photo is redrawn onto a canvas and re-encoded, and that process keeps only the pixels, so the camera model, the date and any GPS coordinates are all left behind. That is usually what you want before sending a photo to somebody. If you would rather see what was in there first, the EXIF viewer will show you.

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