HEIC vs JPG: which should you keep your photos in?

One format is technically superior. The other one works everywhere. Which matters more depends on a question most comparisons never ask.

Updated 28 August 2026 · 11 min read

Two roads lead to this question. Either photos have eaten your storage and you suspect the format, or a file has gone to a colleague, a print shop or a relative and come back with the message that nothing will open it.

The usual comparison lines the two formats up and declares a winner. HEIC is smaller and technically better, so HEIC wins. JPG opens everywhere, so JPG wins. Both conclusions are defensible, which is a good sign that the question is wrong.

The question that actually resolves it is what is this copy for. A photograph you intend to still have in twenty years is not the same object as a photograph you are about to attach to an email. They have different jobs, and the right format follows from the job, not from your temperament or your phone's brand. Once you accept that a single picture can reasonably exist as two files in two formats, most of the argument evaporates.

What each format actually is

JPEG was standardised in 1992, in a world of dial-up modems and hard drives measured in tens of megabytes. It does one thing: it stores a single still photograph, 8 bits per colour channel, using lossy compression that discards detail human eyes are poor at noticing. It has no layers, no transparency, no depth information, no second frame. It is a photograph in a plain envelope.

That narrowness is why it won. A format with one job and no options is easy to implement, and thirty years of software has implemented it. There is effectively nothing with a screen that cannot open a JPG.

HEIC is younger and structurally more ambitious. It became the iPhone camera default with iOS 11 in 2017, and it is not really a single-image format at all — it is a container. Inside, the picture itself is compressed with HEVC, the same video codec used for high-efficiency video, applied to a still frame. Around it the container can hold things JPEG has no room for: multiple images in one file, a depth map describing how far each part of the scene was from the lens, auxiliary layers, thumbnails, and short image sequences like the frames behind a Live Photo.

That is the origin of most confusion about HEIC. When someone says a HEIC file “did not convert properly,” they usually mean a container holding several things was flattened into a single JPEG, which is the only thing a JPEG can be. Nothing malfunctioned. The envelope was smaller than the contents.

Size, quality and colour depth

The headline claim is true: HEIC stores a comparable-looking image in noticeably less space than JPEG needs — commonly 30–50% less, depending on the picture. Two and a half decades of compression research separate the two, and the gap shows.

The corollary catches people out constantly. Convert a HEIC to JPG and the file roughly doubles. That is the system working correctly, not a bug in the converter, and it is one of the more common reasons people end up reading about why an image file is so large after a batch conversion. You bought compatibility and paid in bytes.

Colour depth is the quieter difference, and over a long enough timeframe the more interesting one. JPEG is fixed at 8 bits per channel — 256 steps of red, green and blue. HEIC can carry 10 bits, which is four times as many steps per channel. On most photographs, on most screens, you will not see it. Where it appears is in smooth gradients: a sunset, a clear sky at dusk, a studio backdrop lit unevenly. With 8 bits those transitions can break into visible bands, and once banding is baked into a file it is difficult to remove.

The larger point is editing headroom. Pulling shadows up, recovering a blown sky, pushing contrast — every edit stretches the available steps further apart. A 10-bit file has more room to be stretched before it falls apart. If you never edit your photos, this is theoretical. If you do, or if you might in five years with software that does not exist yet, it is exactly the kind of latitude you cannot recreate later.

Read that table honestly and HEIC wins on file size, quality ceiling, colour depth, editing headroom and what the container can hold. JPG wins the two rows that decide most real situations — compatibility and archival safety — which is the whole problem in miniature.

The compatibility gap, and how it is closing

HEIC's adoption problem was never technical. HEVC, the compression underneath it, is covered by a tangled set of patents administered by several licensing groups. The widely-understood explanation for slow adoption is that this made the format legally awkward and expensive to support — particularly for open-source projects, and for companies unwilling to negotiate with multiple patent pools for the ability to open a photograph. Apple shipped it anyway. Much of the rest of the industry hesitated, and the hesitation lasted years.

The practical situation today is better than its reputation. Current versions of Windows and macOS handle HEIC, most current browsers and mobile operating systems handle it, and mainstream photo software has caught up. What has not caught up is everything else: older machines, corporate systems frozen at an approved build, upload forms that check the file extension against a list written a decade ago, print kiosks, digital photo frames, the laptop your parents have had since 2016. This is why HEIC files still refuse to open on Windows for a great many people despite official support existing.

It is also worth noting what did not happen. HEIC did not become the web's format. The web went in a different direction entirely — toward WebP and then AVIF, both of which sidestep the licensing question — which is a separate comparison covered in WebP vs JPG vs PNG vs AVIF. HEIC's territory is the camera and the photo library, not the web page.

The archive question: will it open in twenty years?

This is where the comparison stops being about compression and starts being about risk.

A format readable by essentially all software for thirty years has demonstrated something a newer format cannot yet demonstrate, however good its engineering. It survived the shift from desktop to web, from web to mobile, from local storage to cloud, and several complete turnovers of the software industry. That track record is evidence, and it is the only kind of evidence available about the future.

This is not nostalgia. It is the ordinary logic of long-lived formats: ubiquity is self-reinforcing. So many billions of JPEGs exist that any system which cannot read them is broken by definition, which guarantees future systems will read them, which produces more JPEGs. Nothing plausibly breaks that loop.

HEIC's position is weaker but not weak. It is the default on an enormous number of cameras, which creates its own gravity, and even if Apple moved on tomorrow the decoders would not vanish. The realistic long-term risk is not that HEIC becomes unreadable — it is that it becomes inconvenient: readable by specialist software, not by whatever your grandchildren use to flick through a folder. That is a mild risk, but it is not zero, and it is asymmetric. The cost of being wrong about JPEG is a bigger file. The cost of being wrong about HEIC is a folder nobody opens.

What is this copy for?

Here is the framework, and it takes one question rather than a flowchart.

Is this copy the one you would be upset to lose, or a copy you are handing to someone else?

If it is the one you would be upset to lose — the original, the thing your backups protect, the file you would return to in order to make a print or re-edit a photo — it should be the highest-quality version you have, in whatever format the camera produced. For an iPhone that means HEIC. Converting it to JPG to be safe is a lossy re-encode: the encoder decodes the HEIC, throws away detail according to JPEG's rules, and writes a new file that is both larger and worse. There is no way back afterwards. The HEIC quality is gone, and no amount of converting the JPG back to HEIC recovers it.

If it is a copy you are handing to someone else — an email attachment, a form upload, a print order, a file for a colleague on an unknown machine — it should be a JPG, and you should not think about it further. The recipient's compatibility is the only requirement that matters, the loss on a single conversion from a good original is invisible in normal viewing, and the file is disposable.

Almost every real decision falls cleanly into one of those two cases. People find this hard only because they keep trying to pick one format for both jobs.

The policy I would actually adopt

Keep your originals in HEIC. Export JPG copies on demand. Do not convert the library.

Concretely: leave the camera on its default, back up the originals as they come off the phone, and when something needs to leave your possession, make a JPG of that specific photo at that specific moment. The JPG is a delivery format, generated when needed and deleted without ceremony. The HEIC is the negative.

This gives you the smaller library, the 10-bit colour, the depth data, and the option to change your mind later — because a HEIC can always become a JPG, while a JPG can never become a HEIC in any meaningful sense. Converting the whole library the other way is the one genuinely irreversible move available, and it doubles your storage in exchange for making it worse. It is difficult to construct a version of that trade which comes out well.

When the opposite is right

The policy above assumes you control your own storage and are reasonably comfortable running a conversion when needed. Sometimes neither holds, and then JPG should be your original format — set the phone to shoot it and stop thinking about formats entirely.

Switch the camera to JPG if you share photographs constantly and to varied recipients, so the friction of converting costs you more than storage does. Switch if your workflow runs through software that chokes on HEIC — older editing tools, a studio pipeline, a work machine you cannot update — because fighting the format daily is worse than accepting larger files. Switch if you are assembling an archive meant to outlive you, a family history handed to people who will not know what a codec is: choose JPG deliberately, for exactly the reason given above. And switch if you are simply not going to maintain a two-format habit, because a policy you follow beats a better one you abandon.

The one situation where converting a large existing HEIC library to JPG is clearly correct is when you are handing that library to someone else — a client, an institution, a relative — and it must open on their equipment without instructions. That is not archiving. That is delivery, and delivery is JPG's job.

Common questions

Does converting HEIC to JPG lose quality? Yes, once. It is a lossy re-encode: the image is decoded and re-compressed under JPEG's rules. At a high quality setting the loss is invisible in normal viewing, but it is permanent, and converting the result back to HEIC recovers nothing. Convert from the original every time rather than converting a converted file.

Why is my JPG bigger than the HEIC it came from? Because HEIC is roughly 30–50% more efficient. A HEIC around 900 KB commonly lands near 1.3 MB as a JPG. This is expected behaviour, not a fault in the conversion.

Should I turn off HEIC on my iPhone? Only if converting is a recurring nuisance in your life rather than an occasional one. The setting is under Camera, Formats — “Most Compatible” shoots JPG. It costs you roughly double the storage and the 10-bit colour, and it buys you never having to think about this again. That is a legitimate trade for some people.

What happens to Live Photos and depth data when I convert? They are lost. JPEG stores one still image and nothing else, so the extra frames, the depth map and any auxiliary layers are discarded. Keep the original HEIC if any of that matters to you — the JPG is a flattened copy, not a replacement.

Is HEIC the same thing as HEIF? Close enough for practical purposes. HEIF is the container specification; HEIC is the common name for HEIF files whose images are compressed with HEVC. You may also see the extension .heif, which behaves the same way for most software.

Will HEIC eventually replace JPG? There is no sign of it. JPEG is too embedded to be displaced, and the newer formats gaining ground on the web are WebP and AVIF rather than HEIC. The realistic future is the one that already exists: HEIC as a capture and storage format, JPG as the universal exchange format, indefinitely.