HEIC to JPG converter, right in your browser

Why HEIC photos will not open on Windows, Android or websites

HEIC is the photo format Apple devices use when the camera is set to High Efficiency. iPhone 7 and later models capture photos as HEIF, which Apple says compresses better than JPEG at the same visual quality (Apple). The picture inside is compressed with HEVC, a codec plenty of other software still cannot read.

Web browsers are the biggest gap. Safari added HEIC in version 17 (WebKit), while Chrome, Edge, Firefox and Samsung Internet still cannot show it, and caniuse puts support at about 17% of browsers in use (caniuse). On a Windows PC, the Photos app asks for an extension: Microsoft's fix is HEIF Image Extensions, which is free, plus HEVC Video Extensions at $0.99, both from the Microsoft Store and both needed even for photos alone (Microsoft). Android can decode HEIF from version 9, but that support is optional for each device (Android Developers).

Apple devices sometimes convert for you. Shared by AirDrop, Messages or email with a device that cannot read HEIF, a photo might go out as a JPEG, and photos copied to a PC over a USB cable might be converted too, unless Keep Originals is chosen under Settings, Apps, Photos (Apple). If a HEIC reached you as a WhatsApp document, a cloud download or an email attachment and will not open, save the file and drop it here.

Renaming photo.heic to photo.jpg does not help. The data inside is still HEIC, and any program that checks the content refuses it. Converting writes real JPG data into a new file.

Free, online, and nothing is uploaded

This converter is a web page, but the converting happens on your own phone or computer. There is no sign-up, no watermark on the JPGs and no daily cap: a batch holds up to 50 photos, and you can run as many batches as you like. Since nothing is uploaded there is no upload size limit either. The real ceiling is your device's memory, and pictures over 200 megapixels are turned away.

In Safari 17 or later, the page lets Safari open the HEIC itself. Other browsers download a HEIC decoder from uncrop.si the first time you convert: libheif with the libde265 HEVC decoder, compiled to WebAssembly, a 1.46 MB file your browser then keeps in its cache. Each photo is decoded in a background worker, drawn on a canvas and saved as a new JPG at the quality you picked. Under the results, a line counts what the page has sent since you added your photos, so you can check for yourself that they stayed put.

Bulk conversion and large HEIC files

We timed the page in Chrome on a Windows laptop. A batch of 50 copies of our 12-megapixel test HEIC (4,032 x 3,024 pixels, 1.8 MB each, 88.1 MB in all) became 50 JPGs at quality 90 in 72 seconds, about 1.4 seconds a photo, and the 106.3 MB zip was ready in under a second. Our largest test file, a 24-megapixel HEIC (5,712 x 4,284) of 3.3 MB, became a 3.7 MB JPG in 3.1 to 3.4 seconds.

Photos are converted one after another, and each JPG gets its Download button as soon as it is done, so you can save the first ones while the rest finish. Stop ends the batch and keeps the JPGs already made. A phone does the same work more slowly, and its browser may not manage a very large picture at full size. Then the page saves the largest size that browser allows and shows the new pixel size next to the file.

JPG quality and file size, for sharing and upload forms

We converted a 1,016 x 1,272 test photo of a mountain lake, saved as a 344 KB HEIC, at four JPG quality settings in Chrome. The JPG came out smaller than the HEIC only at 80 and below. At the default of 90 it was a little bigger, and at 100 about three times the size.

HEVC simply packs photos more tightly than JPG does, so expect a JPG at 90 to be about the size of the HEIC or a little more. That is plenty for posting: Instagram, for one, sizes photos down to a width of 1,080 pixels (Instagram Help), while a 12-megapixel phone photo is 4,032 pixels wide.

Upload forms are stricter. When one wants a JPG under 100 KB or 200 KB, convert here first, then put the JPG through compress image to KB, which finds the highest quality that fits the number you type. To send the photos as one PDF, add the JPGs to JPG to PDF.

HEIC to JPG on iPhone, Mac, Windows and Android

This page works the same way on all four. Each system also has a built-in route, which suits a photo or two:

To stop new photos coming out as HEIC on an iPhone, change the camera format, as the questions below explain. Photos already taken stay HEIC, which is where this page comes in.

Location, dates and other details in phone photos

A photo straight from a phone can say a lot about you in its Exif and XMP data: the GPS position where it was taken, the phone model and lens, the time, and its edit history. Because each JPG here is a new file made only from the pixels, none of that comes along. Our test HEIC carried a GPS position, an iPhone model name and a caption, and the JPGs had none of them.

Looking for a way to convert without losing metadata? One detail is kept on request, and it is the one most people want: tick Keep the date taken and the JPG gets a small Exif block with that date and its time zone offset, so albums still place it on the right day. Everything else stays behind on purpose.

Prefer to keep the HEIC and drop only the location? Remove EXIF data cleans HEIC files in place, without converting them, and the image metadata viewer shows what any photo holds before you share it.