How to Convert HEIC to JPG (Free, Without Uploading Your Photos)

2026-08-18 · 7 min read

Every photo your iPhone takes is HEIC by default. Here is why it will not open on Windows, and four ways to convert it — including one that never uploads your photos anywhere.

You AirDrop a photo from your iPhone to a Windows laptop, double-click it, and nothing happens. Or you attach it to a form and get told the file type is not supported. The file ends in .HEIC and almost nothing outside the Apple ecosystem knows what to do with it.

What HEIC actually is

HEIC stands for High Efficiency Image Container. Apple switched to it as the default camera format in iOS 11, back in 2017. It is a container built on the HEIF standard, which uses the same compression family as HEVC video.

The reason Apple made the switch is straightforward: HEIC files are roughly half the size of an equivalent JPEG at the same visual quality. On a phone where you might shoot thousands of photos, that difference is enormous. HEIC also supports things JPEG cannot — 16-bit colour depth, transparency, image sequences like Live Photos, and non-destructive edits stored alongside the original.

Why it will not open on Windows

HEIC is technically an open standard, but the HEVC codecs it depends on are covered by a dense thicket of patents. Licensing those patents costs money, so Microsoft did not bundle support into Windows by default. For years the codec was a paid add-on in the Microsoft Store. Support has improved in recent Windows 11 builds, but plenty of machines still cannot open the files, and plenty of web forms, content management systems and older applications reject them outright.

Option 1: Stop your iPhone creating HEIC in the first place

If you regularly share photos with Windows or Android users, the simplest fix is upstream. On your iPhone, go to Settings, then Camera, then Formats, and choose "Most Compatible" instead of "High Efficiency". From that point on the camera captures JPEG directly.

The trade-off is real: your photos will take roughly twice the storage, and you lose HEIC-only features. But if the friction of converting files is a weekly occurrence, this saves more time than it costs in disk space.

Option 2: Let the transfer convert for you

There is a second iPhone setting most people never find. Under Settings, Photos, scroll to "Transfer to Mac or PC" and select "Automatic". With this on, iOS converts HEIC to JPEG on the fly when you transfer photos over a cable. Leave it on "Keep Originals" and it sends the raw HEIC.

This only applies to wired transfers. AirDrop, iCloud sharing and email attachments behave differently, which is why the setting confuses people — it works sometimes and not others.

Option 3: Convert in your browser

For files already sitting on your machine, a converter is the practical answer. The important question is whether the converter uploads your photos to a server.

Most online converters do. You select a file, it travels to someone else's infrastructure, gets processed, and you download the result. For a screenshot that is fine. For personal photographs — which carry GPS coordinates and timestamps in their metadata — you are handing a stranger a record of where you were and when.

Our HEIC to JPG converter decodes the file in your browser using WebAssembly. The photo never leaves your device. It handles batches, lets you choose JPG, PNG or WebP output, and gives you a quality slider so you can trade file size against fidelity.

Option 4: Native tools on Mac and Windows

On macOS you do not need anything extra. Open the file in Preview, choose File then Export, and pick JPEG from the format dropdown. For bulk conversion, select multiple files in Finder, right-click, choose Quick Actions, then Convert Image.

On Windows 11, install the HEIF Image Extensions from the Microsoft Store. Once installed, Photos and File Explorer can read HEIC directly, and you can re-save as JPEG through Paint or Photos.

What quality setting should you use

Converting HEIC to JPEG is lossy in both directions — you are decoding one compressed format and re-encoding into another. You cannot recover detail HEIC discarded, and JPEG will discard a little more.

In practice, 90 to 95 percent JPEG quality is visually indistinguishable from the source for almost any photograph. Drop to 80 percent and you will start seeing artefacts in smooth gradients like skies. Below 70 percent, blocking becomes obvious around high-contrast edges. If the photo matters, stay at 90 or above — the file size difference is smaller than you would expect.

One thing to check afterwards

Conversion often strips metadata, which is usually good for privacy but occasionally not what you want. If you rely on the capture date for sorting, verify it survived. If you are sharing photos publicly, the opposite concern applies — you may want to deliberately remove EXIF data including GPS coordinates before posting.

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