Turn the HEIC photos an iPhone takes into JPGs that open in every app, browser and upload form. Convert one or a whole batch, choose the quality, and decide whether the date, camera and location go with them. Nothing is uploaded.
Indistinguishable from the original for nearly every photo. The JPG will usually be larger than the HEIC.
HEIC and HEIF from an iPhone or iPad, plus JPEG, PNG, WebP and most other images. Up to 100 MB each, 100 at a time. Your photos are converted on this device and never uploaded.
Runs entirely in your browser. Nothing you type or upload is sent to a server.
Why iPhones save photos as HEIC
Since iOS 11 in 2017, an iPhone set to its default High Efficiency format stores each photo as HEIC: a HEIF container holding pictures compressed with HEVC, the same codec the phone uses for video. HEVC needs roughly half the space of JPEG for a photo that looks the same, which on a phone with thousands of pictures adds up to many gigabytes.
A HEIC file is also more than one picture. The main image is stored as a grid of small tiles, alongside a thumbnail, the depth map behind Portrait mode and, on recent models, a gain map that lets an HDR screen brighten the highlights. That flexibility is why the format exists, and also why so much software cannot read it. Chrome and Firefox do not display HEIC, many websites refuse it, and Windows needs the HEIF Image Extensions and, on most PCs, the paid HEVC Video Extensions from the Microsoft Store before it can open one. JPG has none of these problems. Practically every device made in the last thirty years can show it.
What happens to your photo
- Decoding. In Chrome, Edge and Firefox the photo is decoded by libheif, an open-source HEIF library compiled to WebAssembly and loaded the first time you need it. Safari uses the decoder built into your Mac or iPhone.
- Turning it upright. A phone held sideways records the rotation separately from the pixels. The rotation is applied to the pixels themselves, so the JPG is the right way up in every app.
- Color. iPhones record in Display P3, a wider range of colors than sRGB. The decoder does not translate colors, so the converter does it, reading the color profile inside the photo. Without that step the JPG would look dull and slightly off in every app that assumes sRGB, which for a JPG is nearly all of them.
- Encoding. The pixels are compressed with MozJPEG, an improved JPEG encoder from Mozilla that makes smaller files than a standard one at the same quality.
Choosing a quality
JPEG quality runs from 1 to 100 and controls how much fine detail the encoder is allowed to discard. It is not a percentage of anything, and the numbers are not comparable between programs. As a guide for phone photos:
| Quality | What you get |
|---|---|
| 95 to 100 | Much larger files for a difference nobody can see. Only for a photo you will edit heavily afterwards. |
| 90 (default) | Indistinguishable from the HEIC on a phone or computer screen. Usually larger than the HEIC, often close to twice its size. |
| 80 | Roughly 40 percent smaller than quality 90. Differences need zooming in on fine texture to find. |
| 60 to 70 | Small enough for email and messaging. Skies and shadows start to show soft blocks. |
Whatever you choose, keep the HEIC as your original. Every time a JPG is opened and saved as a JPG again, a little more is lost, so convert from the HEIC each time rather than from an earlier conversion.
The photo details, and which to keep
Every iPhone photo carries EXIF metadata: the date and time it was taken, the phone and lens, the exposure settings and, unless location is turned off for the Camera, GPS coordinates precise to a few meters. A photo taken at home records your address. The three choices above decide what the JPG keeps:
- Keep date and camera, remove location is the default because the date matters. Apple Photos, Google Photos and Windows Photos all sort by the date stored in the photo, and without it a picture from 2019 lands on the day you converted it.
- Keep everything adds the location back. Use it for your own archive, not for anything you post or send.
- Remove all details writes a JPG with no metadata at all.
The details are rebuilt one field at a time rather than copied as a block, so a removed location is gone from the file, not merely hidden. Apple’s private maker notes are never copied. To check a file before you share it, open it in the photo metadata remover, which shows everything a photo carries.
Getting JPG straight from the iPhone
Two settings avoid the conversion altogether. Settings, Camera, Formats, Most Compatible makes the camera save JPEG from then on, at about twice the storage. Settings, Photos, Transfer to Mac or PC, Automatic converts photos to JPEG as they are copied to a computer over a cable. Neither changes photos already taken, which is where this converter comes in. To shrink photos for a size limit, or save them as WebP or AVIF instead, use the image compressor. To put several into one document, the JPG to PDF converter combines them into a PDF.
