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.
The photograph appears, in a format you can see
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 you are looking at is already the JPEG: the conversion happens on the way in, which is why there is anything to see at all.
There is nothing to install and no account to make, and the page is set up for this one job — the format list is already on JPEG, so the only decision left is whether you want anything else done to the picture while it is here.
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 and re-encoded as a JPEG first, 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, and works through it one photograph at a time rather than all at once — a full-resolution photograph occupies a surprising amount of memory while it is being converted, and twenty together is how that goes wrong. The progress line counts them off, so a set of twenty says where it has got to rather than leaving you watching a spinner.
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 file that is uploaded is deleted automatically a short time later, is stored at a random, unguessable address while it is there, and is used for nothing but producing the versions you asked for. The privacy notice says so bindingly.