HEIC to JPG

Since iOS 11, iPhones have saved photos as HEIC. It is a genuinely better format — roughly half the size of a JPEG at the same quality — but it arrives on a Windows PC, an Android phone or an older application as a file nothing will open. That is almost always why someone is here.

This converts those photos to JPG, which every device and program made in the last thirty years can read. You can also convert to PNG if the photo is going into something that needs lossless input.

There is a detail worth knowing about how this works. Safari, on a Mac or an iPhone, can decode HEIC by itself, because Apple built the format. No other browser can. So on Safari the conversion is instant and nothing extra is downloaded; on Chrome, Edge and Firefox the page fetches a decoder — about a megabyte of it — the moment you drop a file in, and runs it on your device. The tool tells you which happened rather than leaving you to wonder about the wait.

Either way your photos stay on your machine. That matters more than usual here, because these are camera-roll photos: family, documents, things people photograph precisely because they are private. Nothing is uploaded and no copy is made anywhere but your own downloads folder.

If you would rather stop the problem at source, your iPhone can shoot JPEG instead — Settings, Camera, Formats, Most Compatible. You lose the storage saving, but the photos open everywhere.