HEIC to JPG: how to open iPhone photos on Windows and upload them anywhere
iPhone photos save as HEIC, which many websites and Windows apps reject. What HEIC is, how to convert it, and how to make your iPhone shoot JPG instead.
You take a clear photo on your iPhone, send it to your Windows laptop, and it will not open. Or you try to attach it to a job application and the website says “unsupported file type”. The culprit is almost always the same: the photo is a HEIC file.
What is HEIC?
HEIC (also written HEIF) is the “High Efficiency” image format that iPhones and recent iPads have used by default since iOS 11. It stores the same picture as a JPG in roughly half the space, which is useful on a phone. The problem is compatibility. Many websites, older versions of Windows, and a lot of everyday software still only understand JPG and PNG.
Convert HEIC to JPG in your browser
- Open the HEIC to JPG converter.
- Choose your photos. You can select up to 30 at once.
- Pick JPG (smaller files) or PNG (no quality loss, much larger files).
- Click Convert. Download each photo, or all of them together as a ZIP.
At the default 92% quality, the converted JPG looks the same as the original for normal use. The converter downloads a small component the first time, so you need a connection to start, but your photos are never uploaded. They are converted on your device.
Privacy bonus. A converted copy does not carry the camera and location details stored inside the original. If you are sharing a photo publicly, that is often a good thing.
Make your iPhone save JPG instead
If you often send photos to people or websites that do not support HEIC, change the camera setting once:
- Open Settings and choose Camera.
- Tap Formats.
- Select Most Compatible.
New photos will be saved as JPG. Photos you have already taken stay as HEIC, so you will still need to convert those. Note that “Most Compatible” photos take up more storage.
There is also a setting that helps when you connect the iPhone to a computer. Under Settings → Photos, near the bottom, “Transfer to Mac or PC” can be set to Automatic, which converts to a compatible format as the photos are copied.
After converting
A converted photo is often still too big for a form. Typical phone photos are several megabytes, while forms ask for tens or hundreds of KB. Follow the guide to reducing an image to 50 KB, or open the HEIC directly in the image resizer, which reads HEIC files itself.
If you need a PDF, Images to PDF also accepts HEIC, so you can go straight from iPhone photos to one PDF.
Troubleshooting
- “This HEIC file could not be decoded.” A few unusual HEIC variants, for example files from non-Apple cameras that use different compression, may not decode. Export the photo as JPG from the device that took it, or from your phone’s Photos app (Share, then choose a compatible format), then use that.
- Colours look slightly different. HEIC photos may use a wider colour range. The JPG is converted to standard colours, which is what websites expect.
- The file is huge. Lower the JPG quality, or resize the photo to the dimensions you need.