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Convert HEIC to JPG

Drop the photos your iPhone made and get ordinary JPGs back. The conversion happens on your own device, so the pictures are never sent to anyone — which matters more here than on any other page, because these are your photos.

Files never leave your browser

Drop iPhone photos here or click to choose — HEIC and HEIF, as many as you like

Why your iPhone photos are HEIC in the first place

Since iOS 11, an iPhone saves photos as HEIC rather than JPG. Apple did not do this to annoy anyone: HEIC stores roughly the same picture in about half the space, which is why your phone still has room on it.

The trouble starts the moment the photo leaves the phone. Windows cannot open HEIC without an extra codec that Microsoft charges for. Older versions of Photoshop refuse it. Plenty of upload forms reject it outright, often with an error message that does not mention the format at all.

So the file is not corrupted, your phone is not broken, and you did nothing wrong. It is a format standoff, and it has lasted since 2017.

Renaming the file to .jpg does not work

This is the single most common attempt, and it fails every time. Changing photo.heic to photo.jpg changes the label on the box, not what is inside it. Any program that actually reads the file — which is all of them — still finds HEIC data and still refuses.

Converting is a different operation: the picture is decoded from HEIC and written out again as a real JPG. That is what happens here, and what you download is a genuine JPG that any program will accept.

The colours come out right, which is not automatic

iPhone photos are usually recorded in Display P3, a wider range of colour than the sRGB that most converters assume. A converter that ignores this hands back numbers that are correct for P3 but get displayed as sRGB — and the result is a picture that looks faded and slightly grey, most visibly in skies and skin.

This one reads the colour space that is actually recorded inside your file and attaches the matching profile to the JPG it writes. Checked against the reference decoder used by colour-management software, the output matches to within one unit; ignoring the profile is 60 units off. You will not see a number, you will just see a photo that looks like the one on your phone.

Stop it happening to future photos

If you would rather your iPhone stopped making HEIC files at all:

Settings → Camera → Formats → Most Compatible.

From then on new photos are saved as JPG straight from the camera. Photos already on the phone stay HEIC, so you will still need to convert those — but you only have to deal with it once.

The trade is real and worth knowing: JPG files take roughly twice the space, so your phone fills up faster. If storage is tight, leave the setting alone and convert the handful of photos you actually need to send.

What the file never does

Your photo is read from your disk by this page, decoded in your device's memory, and handed back to you as a download. It is not uploaded, not stored, and not seen by anyone — there is no server here doing the work.

That is not just a claim. This page is served with a Content Security Policy containing connect-src 'self', which instructs your browser to refuse any connection to another address. Open your browser's network tab, convert a photo, and watch that nothing leaves. Or load the page once, disconnect from the internet, and convert anyway — it still works.

One honest note about size: the code that reads HEIC is about 2 MB, and it is downloaded the first time you convert something. On a slow connection that takes a moment, and the page says so while it happens. After that it is stored on your device and every later conversion is immediate.

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