Updated September 2026
If you've ever taken a photo on an iPhone and then tried to upload it somewhere that rejected it, you've run into the HEIC/JPG divide. Here's what's actually different between the two formats, and when converting matters.
HEIC (High Efficiency Image Container, based on the HEIF standard) has been the default photo format on iPhones since iOS 11 (2017). Apple switched to it for one main reason: better compression. A HEIC file typically holds the same visual quality as a JPG at roughly half the file size, which matters a lot when a phone is storing thousands of photos and videos. HEIC also supports some things JPG can't — transparency, image sequences (like Live Photos' burst frames), and 16-bit color depth for less banding in gradients.
JPG (JPEG) dates back to 1992, and that age is exactly its advantage: it's supported everywhere — every browser, every operating system, every photo-editing tool, every upload form built in the last three decades. HEIC support has improved a lot (modern Windows, recent browsers, and most current apps handle it), but it's still inconsistent: older Windows installations, some web forms, certain printing services, and plenty of older or niche software either can't open a .heic file at all or handle it unreliably.
| HEIC | JPG | |
|---|---|---|
| Typical file size | ~50% smaller for equal quality | Larger, but predictable |
| Compatibility | Improving, still inconsistent | Near-universal |
| Transparency support | Yes | No |
| Default on | iPhone (since iOS 11) | Android, most cameras, the web |
| Editing support | Growing, but not universal | Every image editor ever made |
.heic — a common wall for real-estate listings, government portals, older forums, and many e-commerce upload widgets.If none of that applies — you're just keeping photos on your own iPhone or backing them up to a service that already handles HEIC fine — there's no real need to convert; you'd just be giving up the space savings for no benefit.
The HEIC to JPG tool on this site does the whole conversion inside your browser tab, in two steps: first, a WebAssembly-based decoder (heic2any, built on libheif) unpacks the HEIC file locally — the same kind of decoding a phone does natively, just running in your browser instead. That decoded image is then drawn onto an in-browser <canvas> and re-encoded to whichever format you choose (JPG, PNG, or WebP) at your chosen quality. Because both steps run locally, the original HEIC file is never uploaded anywhere — the WASM decoder itself is a few megabytes and loads once, then the tool works offline.
Converting HEIC to JPG re-encodes the image, so there is some quality loss — that's true of converting between any two lossy formats. Keeping the quality slider near the top (0.9+) keeps the difference visually negligible for almost any use. If you need a lossless result, convert to PNG instead — larger file, but no re-encoding loss.
One thing a straight HEIC-to-JPG conversion doesn't carry over: an iPhone Live Photo is actually a HEIC still frame paired with a short video clip, and a Portrait-mode photo can carry extra depth-map data inside the HEIC container alongside the visible image. Converting to JPG keeps the visible still frame exactly as seen, but drops the motion component and any depth data — which is usually what you want when the destination only needs a normal photo, but worth knowing if you specifically wanted to preserve the Live Photo's motion, which requires keeping the original HEIC (and its paired .mov) rather than converting.
Will converting HEIC to JPG lose the photo's date or location data? No — the conversion here doesn't touch EXIF fields beyond what canvas re-encoding naturally carries forward for the visible image; if you specifically want to strip metadata as a separate step, use the Remove EXIF tool after converting.
Can I convert a whole camera roll at once? Yes — add as many HEIC files as you like and use "Convert all (ZIP)" to get them all back in one download.
Does this work on Android or Windows, or only iPhone photos? The tool converts any HEIC/HEIF file regardless of what created it — it just happens that iPhones are the most common source.