HEIC to JPG Converter

HEIC is a container — High Efficiency Image Container — holding an image compressed with HEVC, the same codec used for 4K video. Apple made it the iPhone default in 2017 because it stores a photo at roughly half the size of an equivalent JPEG with no visible loss. On its own terms it is a better format, and that is not really in dispute.

The problem is everywhere else. HEVC is patent-encumbered, so decoding it requires licensed support that many platforms never shipped. Older Windows installs need a paid codec from the Microsoft Store. Plenty of Android phones, web upload forms, print shops, CMS uploaders and job-application portals simply reject the file. You end up with a photo you can see perfectly on your own phone and cannot give to anyone.

Converting to JPEG solves that permanently, because JPEG is the closest thing imaging has to a universal format. Nothing built in the last thirty years fails to open one.

The HEIC is decoded to raw pixels in your browser, then re-encoded as a JPEG at quality 0.92 — high enough that the difference is invisible at normal viewing sizes, low enough that the file stays a sensible size. Dimensions are preserved exactly: a 4032 × 3024 photo comes out 4032 × 3024.

The first conversion is slower than the rest. The HEIC decoder is a large module that is deliberately not part of the page — loading it for every visitor, most of whom will never convert anything, would make the site slower for everyone. It is fetched the moment you choose a file and stays cached afterwards, so the second photo converts immediately.

One side effect is worth knowing about, and it happens to be in your favour: because the JPEG is written from decoded pixels rather than copied from the original container, the camera metadata does not come with it. The location where the photo was taken, the device serial, the exact timestamp — none of it is in the file you download. If you specifically need that metadata preserved, this is the wrong tool.

Every in-browser tool on this site makes the same privacy claim, but it lands differently depending on what you are handing over, and photos are the clearest case.

A HEIC straight off an iPhone is not just an image. Unless you have turned it off, it carries the GPS coordinates of where it was taken, accurate to a few metres — which for most people's camera roll means their home address, their workplace, and their children's school. It carries the precise capture time, the device model and often a serial-adjacent identifier. Uploading a batch of holiday photos to a free converter hands all of that to whoever runs it.

And the photos themselves are the point. People convert HEICs because they need to send them to an insurance company, attach them to a claim, upload them to a rental listing, or share them with family. They are pictures of homes, documents, injuries, children. There is no version of that set you would deliberately hand to an unknown third party, and yet the standard way to convert them is to do exactly that.

Here the file is read by your own browser, decoded by your own CPU, and written back to your own disk. The check is the same as anywhere else on this site and takes ten seconds: open the Network tab and convert, or turn off Wi-Fi and convert. Nothing goes out.

A JPEG is a single, flat, 8-bit image, and a HEIC can be more than that — so some things are necessarily lost, and it is better to know which.

Live Photos do not become videos. The motion is stored as a separate .MOV file alongside the still, so converting the HEIC gives you the still frame only; the movement was never in the file you converted. Depth maps from Portrait mode are also dropped, which means the JPEG cannot be re-edited to change the background blur afterwards — the blur already baked into the image stays, but the ability to adjust it does not.

HDR photos are flattened to standard dynamic range, because baseline JPEG has no way to describe brightness beyond it. On an HDR display the converted copy will look slightly less vivid than the original; on everything else it will look identical. Transparency is not a consideration here, since camera photos do not have any.

And as noted above, camera metadata including GPS is not carried across. For most people that is a feature. If you need the original untouched, keep the HEIC — converting is additive, and the file you started with is never modified.