HEIC to JPG: How to Convert iPhone Photos for Any Platform

You just got back from vacation. Two weeks in Portugal, 1,200 photos on your iPhone, and you’re ready to sort through them on your Windows laptop. You plug in the USB cable, open the DCIM folder, and… nothing opens. Every single file ends in .heic. Windows Photo Viewer doesn’t know what to do with them. Paint can’t open them. Even some online upload forms reject them outright.

Congratulations. You’ve just run headfirst into one of the most annoying compatibility problems in modern photography.

I’ve been dealing with HEIC files since Apple introduced them back in 2017, and honestly, the situation hasn’t improved as much as it should have by now. If you’re reading this, you probably need to convert a pile of iPhone photos into something the rest of the world can actually use. Let’s fix that.

Why Apple Switched to HEIC (And Why Nobody Else Followed)

Here’s the thing—Apple didn’t switch to HEIC to annoy you. They actually had a pretty good reason.

When the iPhone 7 came out, Apple was staring down a storage problem. People were taking more photos than ever, shooting in higher resolutions, and complaining that their 64GB phones filled up too fast. Something had to give, and the image format was the obvious target.

HEIC stands for High Efficiency Image Container. It’s based on a video compression standard called HEVC (H.265), the same technology that makes 4K video streaming possible without melting your internet connection. When Apple applied that compression magic to still images, the results were genuinely impressive: HEIC files are roughly 50% smaller than equivalent JPEGs while maintaining the same visual quality. That’s not marketing fluff—it’s a real, measurable difference. A 4MB JPEG from your iPhone becomes a 2MB HEIC. Across 1,200 vacation photos, that’s saving you gigabytes of storage.

HEIC also supports features that JPEG simply can’t touch. It handles 16-bit color depth instead of JPEG’s 8-bit, so you get smoother gradients and more accurate colors. It stores depth maps from Portrait Mode shots. It can hold image sequences like Live Photos in a single file. On paper, it’s a better format in almost every way.

So why hasn’t the rest of the world adopted it? Two words: licensing fees. HEVC, the compression standard underneath HEIC, is covered by a thicket of patents held by multiple companies. Anyone who wants to build HEIC support into their software has to navigate a licensing maze and potentially pay royalties. Microsoft, Google, and most web platforms looked at that mess and said “no thanks.” And that’s why, nearly a decade later, you still can’t open your iPhone photos on half the devices you own.

The Compatibility Problem That Won’t Go Away

Let me paint the full picture of how frustrating this gets in practice.

Windows: Microsoft added basic HEIC support to Windows 10 and 11 through a free extension from the Microsoft Store, but it’s finicky. Sometimes it installs cleanly, sometimes it doesn’t. And even when it works, you can only view HEIC files—you still can’t do much with them in most Windows applications. Try opening a HEIC file in an older version of Photoshop or an entry-level photo editor, and you’ll get an error message.

Web uploads: This is where it really stings. Try uploading a HEIC file to WordPress, Squarespace, Wix, or most website builders. They’ll reject it. Most CMS platforms only accept JPEG, PNG, WebP, and GIF — formats with decades of universal support. (Even GIF, with all its limitations, is accepted everywhere HEIC isn’t.) Social media is hit-or-miss too—some platforms will silently convert HEIC on upload, others won’t accept it at all. If you’ve ever wondered why a photo failed to attach to an email or upload to a form, HEIC was probably the culprit.

Sharing with non-Apple users: You text a photo to someone with an Android phone, and iMessage usually converts it to JPEG automatically. But if you’re emailing photos, sharing via Dropbox, or uploading to a shared Google Drive folder, those files might stay as HEIC. Your coworker on a Chromebook opens the folder and sees a bunch of files they can’t preview.

Printing services: Most online print shops—Shutterfly, Snapfish, even many local print labs—don’t accept HEIC uploads. You’ve selected your 30 best vacation shots for a photo book and now you need to convert every single one before you can order it.

The irony is thick. Apple created a technically superior format that works beautifully within the Apple ecosystem, but the moment those files leave that ecosystem, they become a headache. For a comprehensive look at how different image formats compare for compatibility, our image file formats guide covers the full landscape.

Converting HEIC to JPG with BulkImagePro

Alright, enough complaining about the problem. Let’s solve it.

BulkImagePro’s HEIC to JPG converter handles this in about thirty seconds, and it works right in your browser. No software to install, no account to create, and your photos never leave your device—everything processes locally.

Here’s the workflow:

Step 1: Open BulkImagePro.com/convert/heic-to-jpg in any modern browser. Chrome, Firefox, Safari, Edge—they all work.

Step 2: Drag your HEIC files onto the page, or click to browse and select them from your file system. You can add up to 50 files at once.

Step 3: Your photos convert automatically. BulkImagePro processes them right on your machine using your browser’s built-in capabilities—nothing gets uploaded to a server.

Step 4: Download your converted JPGs individually or grab them all as a single ZIP file.

That’s it. No quality sliders to agonize over, no confusing settings panels. The converter produces high-quality JPEGs that are compatible with literally everything—Windows, Linux, Android, every website, every printer, every application you’ll ever use.

If you need to convert to PNG instead (say, for images where you want to preserve maximum quality or need transparency support down the line), there’s also a dedicated HEIC to PNG converter.

HEIC to PNG vs HEIC to JPG: Which Actually Matters?

This is a question I get asked surprisingly often, and the answer is simpler than you’d think.

Convert to JPG when: you’re dealing with photographs. That’s it. That covers about 95% of what comes off your iPhone. Vacation photos, selfies, food shots, landscapes, portraits—JPG handles all of these perfectly well. The files stay small, they’re universally compatible, and the lossy compression artifacts are invisible at reasonable quality settings. JPG is the format the entire internet was built on, and it’s still the safest choice for photographic images. For a detailed breakdown of format strengths, check out our complete image format conversion guide.

Convert to PNG when: you’ve got screenshots from your iPhone (the ones with text, UI elements, or sharp edges where JPG compression would create visible smearing), or when you plan to do further editing and want to avoid any additional quality loss. PNG is lossless, so what goes in comes out pixel-for-pixel identical. The trade-off is much larger file sizes—a PNG can be 5-10x bigger than a JPG of the same image. If you need even higher fidelity for print or archival work, our TIFF format guide explains when that heavier-weight lossless format is the better choice.

Or convert to WebP when: you’re preparing images for a website and want the best of both worlds. WebP delivers smaller files than JPG with comparable quality, and every modern browser supports it now. BulkImagePro’s format conversion tool can handle that conversion too. Our WebP conversion guide goes deeper on when and how to make the switch to WebP across your entire image library.

For most people reading this guide? JPG is your answer. Don’t overthink it.

”I Have 800 Photos from Last Summer”

Real talk: converting one or two photos is easy. The pain starts when you’ve got hundreds or thousands of HEIC files sitting in a folder, and you need all of them in JPG format. Maybe you’re migrating your photo library to a NAS that doesn’t handle HEIC. Maybe you’re building a client portfolio. Maybe you’ve just been procrastinating on this for six months and the problem has grown.

Here’s the batch workflow I’d recommend.

Organize first. Before you start converting, spend ten minutes sorting your HEIC files into folders by event, date, or project. “Portugal-June-2026,” “Kids-Birthday-Party,” “Product-Shots-Q1.” You’ll thank yourself later when you’re not digging through one giant folder of converted files wondering which JPG goes where.

Convert in batches of 50. BulkImagePro processes up to 50 images per batch. For a set of 800 photos, that’s 16 batches—you can knock it out in under fifteen minutes. Drag a folder’s worth of files in, download the ZIP, repeat. No internet upload means the speed depends on your computer, not your connection.

Check a sample before committing. After your first batch, open a few of the converted JPGs at full size. Make sure the quality looks right and the colors match what you see on your phone. They should—but it takes ten seconds to verify and saves you from discovering a problem after converting everything.

Don’t delete your HEIC originals yet. I know the urge to clean up is strong, but keep those HEIC files around for a while after converting. Store them on an external drive or cloud backup. HEIC actually preserves more color information than JPG, so if you ever need to go back and re-edit a photo, the HEIC version is the better starting point.

If you also need to resize those photos for web use while you’re at it, BulkImagePro’s batch resizer can handle that in the same session. Convert first, then resize—or use the main compressor to optimize file sizes after conversion.

Can You Just Tell Your iPhone to Stop Using HEIC?

You absolutely can, and a lot of people do once they hit this compatibility wall for the first time. Here’s how.

Open Settings on your iPhone, scroll down to Camera, then tap Formats. You’ll see two options:

• High Efficiency — This is HEIC for photos and HEVC for video. It’s the default.
• Most Compatible — This switches to JPEG for photos and H.264 for video.

Flip it to “Most Compatible” and every photo you take from now on will be a plain old JPEG. Problem solved, right?

Well, sort of. Here’s what you’re giving up.

Your photos will take up roughly twice as much storage on your phone. If you’re already bumping against your iCloud storage limit, this makes the problem worse. You’ll also lose some of the richer color data that HEIC preserves, though honestly, for casual photography, you probably won’t notice the difference. Live Photos and Portrait Mode shots will still work, but the underlying data will be less efficiently compressed.

There’s also a middle-ground option that many people don’t know about. In Settings > Photos, there’s a “Transfer to Mac or PC” section with two choices: Automatic and Keep Originals. If you set this to “Automatic,” your iPhone will convert HEIC to JPEG on the fly whenever you transfer photos to a non-Apple device via USB. It’s Apple’s own built-in converter, and it works well—though it only kicks in for USB transfers, not for AirDrop, email attachments, or cloud sync.

My personal take? I keep my iPhone on High Efficiency and convert when I need to. The storage savings are real, the quality is better, and converting a batch of files takes less time than the space savings are worth over months of shooting. But if compatibility headaches are driving you crazy and you’ve got plenty of storage, switching to Most Compatible is a perfectly valid choice. No judgment.

HEIC vs HEIF vs AVIF: Wait, How Many Formats Are There?

The naming confusion around these formats is genuinely terrible, so let me untangle it.

HEIF (High Efficiency Image Format) is the container format—think of it as the box. It defines how image data, metadata, thumbnails, and sequences are organized and stored. HEIF itself doesn’t compress anything; it’s just the packaging.

HEIC (High Efficiency Image Container) is what you get when HEIF uses HEVC compression inside that box. This is what your iPhone actually produces. Every .heic file on your phone is technically a HEIF container with HEVC-compressed image data inside. The terms get used interchangeably, but strictly speaking, HEIC is a specific type of HEIF.

AVIF is what happens when you put AV1 compression inside that same HEIF container structure. Same basic packaging concept, different compression engine inside. The critical difference? AV1 is royalty-free, developed by the Alliance for Open Media (Google, Mozilla, Apple, Microsoft, and others). That’s why AVIF is gaining web adoption where HEIC never did—nobody has to pay licensing fees to support it.

Here’s a quick comparison:

	HEIC	AVIF	JPG
Compression vs JPG	~50% smaller	~50% smaller	Baseline
Licensing	Patent-encumbered	Royalty-free	Free
Browser support	Safari only	Chrome, Firefox, Safari, Edge	Universal
iPhone native	Yes	No	Via settings change
Web-ready	No	Yes (with fallbacks)	Yes
Transparency	Yes	Yes	No

If you want to go deeper on how HEIF and AVIF compare technically, we’ve got a detailed HEIF vs AVIF comparison that covers encoding speed, quality benchmarks, and browser support timelines.

For practical purposes: your iPhone shoots HEIC, the web prefers JPG or WebP (and increasingly AVIF), and converting between them is the bridge you need. That’s really all you need to remember.

The Reverse: Converting JPG to HEIC

This comes up less often. Sometimes you need to go the other direction—converting JPG or PNG files into HEIC format. Maybe you’re building an iOS app and need HEIC assets, or maybe you want to save storage space in a photo archive.

BulkImagePro handles this too. The JPG to HEIC converter and PNG to HEIC converter work the same way—drag, drop, download. Just keep in mind that converting a JPG to HEIC won’t magically improve the image quality. You’ll get smaller file sizes thanks to better compression, but any detail that was lost in the original JPEG compression stays lost. You can’t squeeze blood from a stone.

Wrapping Up

HEIC is a genuinely good format stuck in a genuinely bad compatibility situation. Apple made the right technical call, but the rest of the industry didn’t follow, and here we are—millions of people with photos they can’t easily open, share, or upload.

The fix is straightforward. Convert to JPG when you need universal compatibility, convert to PNG when quality preservation matters most, and use a batch tool so you’re not doing it one painful file at a time.

BulkImagePro’s HEIC to JPG converter handles the conversion in your browser with no uploads, no accounts, and no limits on free usage. Drop your files in, get your JPGs out, and get on with your day.

Frequently Asked Questions

Does converting HEIC to JPG reduce image quality?

There is a small quality reduction since HEIC uses more efficient compression than JPG, and converting between lossy formats always introduces some loss. However, at high quality settings, the difference is virtually invisible to the human eye. For everyday use—sharing photos, printing, uploading to websites—you won't notice any degradation. If you need a lossless conversion, convert HEIC to PNG instead, which preserves every pixel exactly.

Can I batch convert HEIC files to JPG for free?

Yes. BulkImagePro's HEIC to JPG converter is free to use with no account required. You can process up to 50 images per batch, and everything runs locally in your browser—no files are uploaded to any server. For hundreds of photos, just run multiple batches back to back.

Why can't Windows open HEIC files?

HEIC uses HEVC compression, which is covered by patents that require licensing fees. Microsoft chose not to include native HEIC support in Windows to avoid these costs. You can install the free "HEIF Image Extensions" from the Microsoft Store to add basic viewing support, but many Windows applications still won't be able to edit or process HEIC files natively.

How do I stop my iPhone from taking photos in HEIC format?

Go to Settings, then Camera, then Formats, and select "Most Compatible" instead of "High Efficiency." This switches your camera to shoot in JPEG and H.264 video. The trade-off is that your photos and videos will take up roughly twice as much storage space on your device.

Is HEIC the same thing as HEIF?

Not exactly, though they're closely related. HEIF (High Efficiency Image Format) is the container format that defines how image data is packaged. HEIC (High Efficiency Image Container) is a specific type of HEIF that uses HEVC compression. All HEIC files are HEIF files, but HEIF can also use other compression methods like AV1 (which produces AVIF files). In everyday conversation, HEIC and HEIF are used interchangeably when talking about iPhone photos.

Should I convert HEIC to JPG or WebP for my website?

For websites, WebP is the better choice. WebP files are 25-35% smaller than equivalent JPEGs while maintaining comparable visual quality, and every modern browser supports the format. Convert HEIC to JPG only if you need to support very old browsers or systems that don't handle WebP. BulkImagePro can convert HEIC to either format.