HEIC to JPG — Batch-Convert iPhone Photos Online for Messaging, Email and Print, Decoded Locally

HEIC to JPG solves the most practical of problems: a photo that can be sent out and opened without fuss. Since iOS 11, the iPhone has saved photos as HEIC by default, at roughly half the size of a JPG for the same perceived quality, but the format becomes a roadblock the moment you copy files to a Windows PC, drop them into Word or PowerPoint, hand them to a print shop, or upload them to a form that only accepts JPG. This page decodes the HEIC and re-encodes it as JPG, with a quality slider you control: higher values keep more detail and produce larger files, and around zero point eight five is usually a good balance. JPG has no alpha channel, so for source material with transparent areas you can pick a fill colour — white by default — to avoid dark fringes. Drag in several files at once, watch each one in the batch list, step through the preview with Previous and Next to compare side by side, then download one image or pack the whole batch into a ZIP. JPG is only the default; the dropdown switches to PNG or WebP at any time without importing again. Decoding tries the browser’s own capabilities first and falls back to a local WASM decoder, with nothing uploaded and the page still working offline. The result is a clean new file that does not automatically carry over EXIF shooting time, camera model or location, which is one less thing to worry about before sharing; the batch list also lets you retry a failed file on its own or download just a few images.

Import images

Drop HEIC or HEIF images here, or click to choose filesImport several at once, or press Ctrl+V to paste an image from the clipboardAVIF, JPG, PNG and WebP are accepted too · up to 40.00 MB per file · 30 files maxChoose images

Target format

Output format

All three formats reuse the same decoded pixels, so switching re-exports automatically — no need to import again.

JPG is the most compatible and usually the smallest. Ideal for messaging, email, printing and older systems; it cannot store transparency.

Compression quality 88%

Higher values keep more detail and produce larger files. Around 0.85 suits photos; push it higher for screenshots.

Transparency fill

JPG has no alpha channel, so transparent and semi-transparent areas are filled with this colour. White by default.

Extra rotation

Some HEIC files store orientation as a container property and decode sideways. Correct it here if needed.

Filename suffix

Leave it empty to keep the original name; the extension is replaced with the output format.

Preview and export

Import an image to compare the original and converted result side by side or with a draggable split.

Batch list

0 / 0 Done

No images imported yet.

How to use

Drag HEIC or HEIF photos into the import area, or click Choose images to select several at once; Ctrl+V pastes a screenshot too. The tool identifies the real container from the file header, so a wrong extension does not matter.
Leave the target format on its default JPG and start with quality around zero point eight five to see the file size, then nudge it either way: push a photo too hard and the sky bands; for text screenshots, watch whether strokes go soft.
If the source has transparent areas, choose a background colour in Transparency fill. A few HEIC files store orientation as a container property and decode sideways — correct those with Extra rotation.
Use Previous and Next in the preview to check both panes image by image, then download the current one, download individual rows from the batch list, or pack everything into a ZIP. Changing the dropdown re-exports the already-decoded images automatically.

Frequently asked questions

Why will photos from my iPhone not open on Windows?

Because iOS 11 and later save them as HEIC by default, and early Windows builds shipped without an HEVC decoder: Explorer shows a blank icon, and Word, PowerPoint and many application forms do not recognise the file either. Microsoft later offered HEIF and HEVC extensions in its store, some of them paid, so behaviour still differs between old and new machines. A JPG depends on nothing installed on the system, opens on any computer you copy it to, and is the least troublesome thing to send to someone else.

Does converting to JPG lose quality a second time?

It does, though usually invisibly. HEIC is already lossy, and decoding to pixels before re-encoding with a JPG quantisation table is a second lossy pass; sky gradients and high-contrast edges are the likeliest places to show faint banding or ringing. Above quality zero point eight five it is essentially imperceptible at normal viewing sizes. If you want no further loss at all, use the PNG page, which stores the decoded pixels losslessly.

What happens to a transparent background?

JPG has no alpha channel, so transparent and semi-transparent areas must be composited onto a solid colour — white by default, or any colour you choose in Transparency fill. For a cut-out product shot or a rounded logo, pick the colour of the page it will sit on, otherwise a white halo appears on a dark background. Switch to PNG or WebP if you need to keep the transparency.

My photo is sideways. How do I fix it?

HEIC orientation may live in EXIF or be written as a container rotation property, and browsers and WASM decoders do not all handle it the same way, so a few files come out rotated. This tool attempts to read the EXIF orientation and straighten the image automatically; if it is still wrong, choose ninety or one hundred and eighty degrees under Extra rotation. Every image re-exports at the new angle immediately, with no need to import again.

Are my photos uploaded to a server?

No. Decoding, orientation correction, quality adjustment and encoding all happen in the browser, and the HEIC decoder is a WASM module downloaded with the page and run locally. Image data never leaves your device and the page has no upload endpoint. Once it has loaded you can even keep converting offline. The flip side is that the list is gone when you close the tab, so keep your own backup of important originals.

What is it

HEIC is a container; the pixels inside are actually compressed by HEVC intra coding. JPG, by contrast, specifies both a file format and a lossy algorithm built on the discrete cosine transform, so the two are not on the same layer. HEVC splits the frame into coding tree units, predicts each block from its neighbours, records only the prediction residual, and then applies transform, quantisation and entropy coding — which is why it describes the same picture with fewer bits. Converting to JPG means decoding fully back to pixels and then transforming and quantising them again in eight-by-eight blocks, an irreversible second round of loss: detail already discarded by the original HEIC never returns, quantisation removes a little more, and sky gradients or high-contrast edges are the first to show banding or ringing. JPG also commonly uses four-two-zero chroma subsampling, halving colour resolution so that fine red text and coloured lines soften slightly. The payoff is a decoder that is everywhere: almost any device, editor, print workflow and web page opens it directly. The quality slider controls the quantisation table, and setting it to one keeps the most detail but noticeably enlarges the file. HEIC files with transparent pixels are composited onto the chosen background first, because JPG has no transparency dimension at all.

Origin & history

The timeline has two strands. JPG comes first: in 1992 the JPEG standard was published jointly by ISO and ITU, using the discrete cosine transform and quantisation tables to squeeze a photograph into a few tens of KB, and it became the de facto common language of cameras, web pages and email. Around 1994 the JFIF interchange format spread and virtually every program learned to read it. In three decades it barely changed, at the cost of eight-bit depth, no transparency and visible blocking at high compression. The other strand is video coding: in 2013 ITU and ISO completed H.265, also called HEVC, whose intra prediction is finer than H.264’s and saves roughly half the bitrate at the same quality. In 2015 MPEG finalised HEIF on top of the ISO base media file format, packing HEVC intra images, thumbnails, burst sequences, depth maps and metadata into one container, and allowing a rotation property to record orientation without rewriting pixels. In 2017 Apple made HEIC the default photo format in iOS 11 and macOS High Sierra; overnight hundreds of millions of devices began producing these files, while the ecosystem lagged behind — Windows needed a store extension, Android vendors varied, and for a long time only Safari displayed HEIC in a browser. During those years server-side transcoding and online converter sites were almost the only universal answer, and they passed the privacy cost on to users. After 2018, open-source implementations such as libheif matured, and with Emscripten-built WASM versions a web page could finally decode without uploading; meanwhile canvas toBlob had long supported JPG with a quality argument, so the encoding side was never the problem. Local decoding plus local re-encoding thus became the plainest and most dependable combination. A single click today appears to save only an upload, but what it really does is straighten a data path that should never have taken a detour. Later AVIF pushed compression further with AV1 intra coding, and JPEG XL made its own round through standardisation, yet browser support has never matched the installed base of JPG; bringing HEIC from a phone back to that thirty-year-old format is still the cheapest route to compatibility.