Convert HEIC to JPG

Apple switched the default camera format in iOS 11, back in 2017, because HEIC stores roughly the same picture in about half the space of a JPEG. On an iPhone that is a straightforwardly good trade. The problem is everything that is not an Apple device: HEIC wraps the HEVC codec, which is patent-encumbered, and Google and Mozilla both declined to license it — so Chrome and Firefox cannot display a HEIC at all, and Windows can only after installing a paid extension from the Microsoft Store.

A little, and less than people expect. Both formats are lossy, so this is a second lossy step and it cannot be undone — but at quality 82 and above the loss is invisible at any normal viewing size, including printed at postcard size. What you will notice is the file getting bigger: JPEG needs roughly twice the bytes to hold the same picture, which is the whole reason Apple moved away from it.

The conversion happens in your browser and does not deliberately strip anything, but EXIF handling through a canvas is not guaranteed, so treat the timestamp and GPS coordinates as likely to be lost. If the metadata matters — for insurance, legal or archival reasons — keep the original HEIC as well. That is worth doing regardless: the HEIC is your master copy and it is smaller than the JPEG you just made.

You will get the still frame, which is almost always what people actually want. A Live Photo is a HEIC paired with a short MOV file; this reads the image and ignores the video. A burst is stored as several images in one container and the first is used. If you specifically need the video half of a Live Photo, export it from Photos on the phone instead — no format converter can produce it, because it is a separate file.

Yes — drop the whole selection in and each one is converted independently, on your device. That matters more here than on most pages, because HEIC files arrive in batches: a holiday, an event, an insurance claim. Nothing is uploaded, so a hundred photos is a question of how long your laptop takes rather than how long an upload takes.

Usually, yes. A 12-megapixel photo is around 1.6 MB as HEIC and around 3.2 MB as JPG — roughly 2.0× larger. Because JPG is a lossy format you can trade quality for size, so the exact result depends on the quality setting you pick.

Slightly. Re-encoding one lossy format as another means a second round of compression, which can soften fine detail. In practice the loss is hard to see at high quality settings, and JPG's newer codec often preserves detail better than the HEIC original did. Keep quality at 80 or above and the difference will not be visible at normal viewing size.

JPG has no alpha channel, so transparency cannot be preserved. Any transparent or semi-transparent pixels are composited onto a solid background — white by default — before encoding. If transparency matters, convert to PNG or WebP instead, both of which support it fully.

Only the first frame is converted. Every conversion here decodes one frame onto a canvas and re-encodes it, so the result is always a still image — that applies to JPG as much as to any other target. To shrink an animation while keeping the motion, a video file (MP4 or WebM) is usually around a tenth of the size of the equivalent HEIC, and needs an encoder we do not ship yet.

HEIC uses the patent-encumbered HEVC codec, which Google and Mozilla declined to license, so Chrome and Firefox cannot display it at all. Windows can, but only after installing a paid HEVC extension from the Microsoft Store. Converting to JPG sidesteps the whole problem — and you can stop the issue at the source by setting your iPhone to Settings → Camera → Formats → Most Compatible, which saves JPEGs instead.