Convert HEIC photos to JPG or PNG in seconds.

The complete guide

Everything to know about converting HEIC photos

If you've landed here, there's a good chance you tried to open, upload, or share a photo from your iPhone and ran into a file it wouldn't accept. That's almost always a HEIC file meeting software that doesn't recognize it yet. This guide covers what HEIC actually is, when converting makes sense, how to choose between JPG and PNG, and how this specific tool handles the job — so you're not just clicking a button, you understand what it's doing.

Why iPhone photos are HEIC in the first place

Since iOS 11, iPhones have saved photos as HEIC (High Efficiency Image Container) by default instead of the older JPG format. HEIC uses newer compression technology that stores a photo at roughly half the file size of an equivalent-quality JPG, which is a meaningful difference when your camera roll holds tens of thousands of photos. It's a sensible default for Apple's own ecosystem — the trade-off is that plenty of software outside that ecosystem, especially on Windows and older Android devices, either can't open HEIC files at all or handles them inconsistently.

When you actually need to convert

You don't need to convert every photo you take — HEIC works perfectly well within Apple's apps and services. Conversion becomes worth doing in specific situations: uploading a photo to a website or job application that rejects the .heic extension, sending a photo to someone on a Windows PC or Android phone, using an image in software that doesn't recognize HEIC, or printing at a lab that only accepts standard formats. If you're not sure whether a particular destination needs a converted file, it's usually faster to just try uploading the HEIC version first — many modern platforms handle it fine.

JPG or PNG — how to actually choose

This is the one decision this tool asks you to make, and it's simpler than it looks. Choose JPG for everyday sharing, uploading to websites, emailing, and printing — it keeps file sizes small and is supported by literally everything. Choose PNG specifically when you're about to edit the photo further, need a fully lossless archival copy, or you're placing the image into design software where compression artifacts would be more visible. PNG files typically run three to five times larger than the equivalent JPG, which is the cost of not discarding any image data during conversion. For most people converting a batch of vacation or family photos to send along, JPG is the right default. Our HEIC vs. JPG comparison and HEIC to PNG guide go deeper into this trade-off if you want the full picture.

How this converter actually works

Unlike a lot of "free HEIC converter" websites, this tool doesn't upload your photos anywhere. When you drop a file into the drop zone, JavaScript running inside your own browser tab decodes the HEIC image data and re-encodes it as JPG or PNG using your device's own processing power — the same way a desktop app would, just running in a tab instead of an installed program. The file never travels over the internet, which means there's no server-side storage, no account needed, and the tool keeps working even if your connection drops partway through a batch. If you want the deeper explanation of why that distinction matters, see our piece on whether it's safe to convert HEIC files online.

Getting the best results

A few small choices affect how your converted files turn out. If you're converting to JPG, the quality slider controls the balance between file size and sharpness — 85% is a sensible default that's visually indistinguishable from the original for most photos, but nudge it toward 100% for images you plan to print or archive, and lower it if you're optimizing for upload speed or storage. Converting in batches is fully supported: select or drag in an entire folder at once rather than repeating the process file by file. Converted files keep their original filenames (just with the new extension), so your existing folder organization carries over without extra renaming.

Supported devices and browsers

Because this runs as a website rather than an installed app, it works identically on iPhone, Android, Mac, and Windows, in any recent version of Chrome, Safari, Firefox, or Edge. There's nothing to install and no app store to visit — if you can open this page, you can convert photos on it. This also makes it a convenient option when you're on a device you don't fully control, like a work computer where installing new software isn't an option.

What people usually ask next

The most common follow-up questions are about privacy (covered above and in our privacy policy), whether there's a limit on how many photos you can convert (there isn't — batch size is only limited by your device's available memory), and whether quality is affected (PNG conversion is lossless by definition; JPG involves a small, generally invisible amount of re-compression at the default settings). If your question isn't covered here, the full FAQ page and blog go into more specific scenarios, including device-by-device instructions and troubleshooting for when Windows won't open a HEIC file at all.