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.
Drop your iPhone photos here
One, or up to 20 together. Files straight off an iPhone, out of an AirDrop, or copied from a backup all work.
Nothing to install and nothing to choose. The container everything refuses is dealt with for you, and what comes out is an ordinary JPEG written at a high quality setting.
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
HEIC is the format every recent iPhone uses for its photographs: a High Efficiency Image Container holding a picture compressed with HEVC, the technique built for video. It stores roughly the same photograph in about half the space a JPEG needs, which is why Apple adopted it. It is also why a photo straight off an iPhone will not open on a Windows machine and is refused by plenty of upload forms.
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. Once the JPEG is made it previews normally, because everything can read one of those.
The file that is uploaded sits at a random, unguessable address, is used for nothing but producing the versions you asked for, and is deleted automatically after a short period. Nothing reads the contents. The Privacy Notice sets out exactly what is kept and for how long.
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