Free Online Image OptimizerGetting an iPhone photo out of HEIC
Take a picture on any recent iPhone and it is saved as HEIC, a format chosen because it stores a better photograph in about half the space. Then you try to attach it to something and discover how few programs will open one. This walks through converting a photo, and is honest about the one cost involved.
The format your phone picked without mentioning it
HEIC is genuinely good — the compression is years ahead of JPEG and Apple did not adopt it capriciously. The difficulty is everywhere else. Windows needs an add-on before Explorer will show a thumbnail, a great many upload forms reject the extension outright, and both Chrome and Firefox decline to display one on every operating system, including Apple's own.
So the file is fine and the world around it is not, which makes converting the pragmatic answer. iPhone HEIC to JPG is set up for exactly that and nothing else.
It is decoded on your own machine, and then you can see it
Hand the file over and the photograph appears on the stage, which is quietly remarkable given that the browser showing it to you cannot open a HEIC. What happened in between is the whole design: the page fetches a decoder the first time one is needed, unpacks the photograph locally, and writes an ordinary JPEG from it. The picture you are looking at is that JPEG.
So the original never travels. Only the converted file is uploaded, and only so it can be compressed on the way back to you — the decoding, the part that needs the format nothing supports, happened before anything left the building.
From there it behaves like any other photograph here. The editing tools are live, Before / after works, and the settings apply as usual, because by this point the awkward format is already behind you.
Asking for something other than JPEG
JPEG is the default because it is the thing that opens everywhere, which is the whole reason you came. The format list is still there, though, and picking PNG or WebP works — the button changes its wording to match, so it never promises one format while the settings ask for another.
Worth knowing what that costs. The photograph is decoded here and re-encoded as a JPEG before it goes anywhere, and any other format you choose is then made from that JPEG. Two lossy steps instead of one. The intermediate is written at a deliberately generous quality so there is very little to notice, but if what you want is a PNG the honest advice is to convert once and stop.
Worth knowing
Several photographs at a time
The page takes a batch. Each one is decoded in turn rather than all at once, because a full-resolution photograph occupies a surprising amount of memory while it is being worked on and doing twenty simultaneously is how a phone gives up. The progress line counts them off.
Turning it off on the phone instead
If you would rather not do this again, iOS can be told to record the older format from the start: Settings, then Camera, then Formats, then Most Compatible. You lose the space saving and gain files everything accepts. For photographs already taken, this page is the way back.
Where the file goes
The original never leaves your device. The converted JPEG is uploaded so it can be compressed, then deleted automatically a short time later, and used for nothing but producing the versions you asked for. The privacy notice says so bindingly.