Every recent iPhone saves its photographs as HEIC, and almost everything that is not an Apple device refuses to open one — Windows Photo Viewer, most upload forms, a good many email clients and nearly every older program. The picture is fine; the container is the problem. Drop them here and they come back as ordinary JPEGs, which nothing has refused since about 1994. The conversion runs on your own device, which is unusual here and is explained below.
One, or up to 20 together. Files straight off an iPhone, out of an AirDrop, or copied from a backup all work.
Not on our servers, and not by your browser's own picture support — neither can read a HEIC. A decoder is downloaded the first time you convert something, and the work happens here.
Every photo gets its own button, and a batch comes back as a single zip file.
Step by step, with screenshots: How to convert iPhone HEIC photos to JPG
Because your browser cannot read HEIC. Chrome and Firefox both refuse it, on every operating system; Safari on a Mac or an iPhone shows it perfectly. That is the whole reason this page exists — and it is why a decoder has to be downloaded before anything can happen. Once the JPEG is made it previews normally, because everything can read one of those.
Not in order to convert it, no. Your browser downloads a decoder the first time you use this page — about half a megabyte, once — and the photograph is read and turned into a JPEG without leaving your device. Only that JPEG is then sent to be optimised, and it is deleted from our servers automatically after a short period.
Because it is genuinely better. HEIC holds roughly the same picture in about half the space of a JPEG, which on a phone full of photographs is a great deal of room. The trouble is only that support outside Apple's own devices is still patchy years later, which is a problem for anyone who has to send a picture to somebody else.
A little, and less than you would expect. Both formats discard detail to save space, so converting means decoding one and encoding the other. The JPEG is written at a high quality setting for exactly that reason, and at normal viewing size the difference is not visible. The file will usually be larger than the HEIC was, because JPEG is the less efficient format — that is the price of it opening everywhere.
Yes, and it is worth doing if you send photographs to other people often. In Settings, under Camera, then Formats, choosing Most Compatible makes the camera record JPEG instead. You lose the space saving and gain never having to convert anything again.
Free Online Image Optimizer