HEIC to JPG: why iPhone photos will not open, and how to fix it
Updated 7 min read
You AirDrop or email a photo from an iPhone, and the person on the other end reports that the file will not open. The extension is .heic or .heif, and nothing they own wants to read it. This is not a corrupted file and not a mistake on your part — it is a format that most Apple devices produce by default and that a large part of the rest of the world still cannot open.
What HEIC actually is
HEIC is a container for images encoded with HEVC, the same video codec as H.265. It stores a photo at roughly half the size of an equivalent JPEG with no visible quality loss, supports 10-bit colour and transparency, and can hold several images in one file — which is how Live Photos and iPhone burst shots are packaged.
On the technical merits it is a straightforward improvement on JPEG. The difficulty is licensing: HEVC is covered by patent pools that require royalty payments, so operating systems and browsers have been slow, and in some cases unwilling, to ship decoders. Apple pays for its own; a lot of other software does not.
The practical result in 2026:
- Apple devices open HEIC everywhere.
- Windows 11 can, once the HEIF Image Extensions are installed from the Microsoft Store — which is a step most people have not taken.
- Android handles it on recent versions, inconsistently on older ones.
- Browsers mostly do not. No major browser decodes HEIC natively.
- Upload forms, CMS uploaders and print services frequently reject the extension outright.
So the format is fine and the compatibility is not, which is the whole problem.
Stop producing it in the first place
If you are the one sending photos, the cleanest fix is upstream.
On the iPhone or iPad: Settings → Camera → Formats → Most Compatible. New photos are captured as JPEG from that point on. You lose about half the storage efficiency and the option of 10-bit HDR stills. Existing photos are unchanged.
When transferring to a computer: Settings → Photos → scroll to Transfer to Mac or PC → Automatic. This converts to JPEG during the transfer, which is often all you need — the phone keeps its efficient originals and the computer receives files that open.
When sharing a single photo: the Share sheet’s Options panel lets you send a compatible copy for that share only.
If none of those apply — the photos already exist, or somebody else sent them — you are converting.
Converting a folder
The usual advice is to upload the files to a conversion website, which means handing personal photographs to a server you know nothing about, usually with a daily limit and a wait. For holiday photos and photographs of documents that is a poor trade.
Doing it in the browser avoids the upload entirely. Drop the whole folder into the converter, pick JPG, set the quality, and export everything as one ZIP. The files are decoded and re-encoded on your own machine; nothing is transmitted.
This used to come with a caveat: the work happening in your browser meant it depended on your browser being able to decode HEIC, and most cannot. That is no longer the case. The editor asks the browser first, and only if the browser refuses does it load a HEIC decoder — about 1.3 MB, served from this site rather than a third-party CDN — and convert the photo to JPEG before anything else touches it.
- Safari on macOS and iOS uses the system codec. Nothing extra is downloaded.
- Chrome, Edge and Firefox fall back to the bundled decoder. The first HEIC file of a session waits a second or two while it loads; after that each photo takes roughly a second, and a progress counter shows where the batch is.
Either way the photo never leaves your device — the decoder is code arriving, not a file departing. And if you never open a HEIC file, that 1.3 MB is never downloaded at all.
Which format to convert to
JPEG is the answer in almost every case, because compatibility is the entire reason you are converting. Quality 85 is a sensible default; the file will land at roughly double the HEIC size, which is the price of universality.
WebP is worth considering if the destination is a web page you control. It is far better supported than HEIC and much smaller than JPEG.
PNG is the wrong answer for photographs. It is lossless, so converting a compressed photo to it produces an enormous file that contains no more real detail than the source.
Two things that get lost
Live Photos become still images. The motion is stored as a separate video track that a still format has nowhere to put. Convert a Live Photo and you keep the key frame.
Metadata is stripped by browser-based conversion. Camera settings, timestamps and GPS coordinates do not survive a canvas export. This is a real loss if you sort by capture date — but it is the outcome you want for anything about to be published, since a photo posted with its GPS tag intact is a common and avoidable mistake. The Convert tab lists what it found in the file before you export, so you can see what is about to go rather than finding out later that it was there.
Depth, HDR and burst frames
HEIC files from recent iPhones can carry more than a photograph: a depth map used for Portrait mode, HDR gain maps, and multiple frames from a burst. None of these have a JPEG equivalent, so conversion flattens them to the single rendered image.
For most uses that is fine — the rendered image is what you were looking at anyway. But if you might want to re-edit the Portrait blur later, keep the HEIC original as well as the JPEG copy rather than converting in place.
A workable habit
Keep the originals in HEIC where they were captured, since that is where they open and where the storage saving matters. Convert to JPEG at the point of sending, not the point of storage. And if you send photos to other people often enough that this keeps happening, switch the camera to Most Compatible and stop paying the tax.