Convert HEIC to JPG

HEIC → JPG — formats compared

About HEIC

HEIC is Apple's name for a HEIF container holding HEVC (H.265) compressed photos — the default iPhone and iPad camera format since iOS 11. It packs roughly the same picture into about half the size of a JPEG and can store 10-bit colour, depth maps and Live Photo frames.

About JPG

JPG (JPEG) is a lossy raster format tuned for photographs: it discards detail the eye barely notices to reach small file sizes, but it has no transparency channel.

What changes in this conversion

HEIC can carry transparency but JPG can't, so any transparent areas are filled with solid white — for an ordinary camera photo, which is fully opaque, this makes no visible difference. HEIC and JPG are both lossy, so the photo is re-encoded a single time; at a high quality setting the result is visually indistinguishable from the source. Because HEIC is unusually space-efficient, the JPG is often larger than the original even though the picture is unchanged.

When to convert HEIC → JPG

This is the conversion most people actually need: an iPhone photo saved as HEIC won't upload to many websites, attach in older email clients, or open on some Windows PCs and Android phones, so turning it into JPG makes it work literally everywhere.

Worth knowing: JPG has no transparency and is re-encoded lossily, so the file is larger than the original HEIC even though the picture looks the same — HEIC's efficiency is the price you pay for JPG's universal compatibility.