HEIC to JPG converter

Because HEIC is the better format. Apple puts it plainly: HEIF and HEVC offer better compression than JPEG and H.264, so they use less storage space. That is the whole reason your iPhone saves photos this way. Converting one to JPG does not shrink it — it re-packs the same picture with older, less efficient compression, and the file often comes out larger.

We measured it on 5 September 2026 with a 1.5 MB iPhone photo. The same picture came out of Chrome as a 1.6 MB JPG and out of Safari as a 2.6 MB one, at the same quality setting. Nothing was wrong: that is simply what the two formats cost.

So if something is refusing your photo, work out which thing it is refusing. If it will not take the format, converting to JPG is the whole answer. If it says the file is too big, converting alone can make it worse, and you want a size under “Make it smaller” — or a longest side of 2048 pixels, which usually does more than quality can.

Converting is also not renaming. The picture is decoded and encoded again, and JPG throws away a little detail every time it is written. Doing it once is fine and you will not see it. Doing it over and over is the photocopier effect — each copy a little worse than the last — so convert from the original rather than from a converted copy.

Why your browser needs help at all: HEIC holds its picture in HEVC, a patented video codec. Apple licenses it, so Safari 17 and later and iOS 17 and later show HEIC directly. Chrome, Firefox and Edge do not, at any version, according to caniuse on 5 September 2026. This page tries your browser first and falls back to a decoder it downloads only if your browser cannot do it — which is why the same photo converts instantly on an iPhone and takes a second or two in Chrome.

An iPhone writes more than a picture into a photo. There is the GPS position where you stood, the moment you pressed the button, the phone and lens, and the way up the picture should be shown. Almost none of it comes through a conversion, and for a business that is mostly good news: a photo taken at a customer’s house does not carry their address to wherever you post it.

One more thing worth knowing. A HEIC file can hold more than one picture — the format was built for single images, image collections, image bursts, image sequences, stereo pairs and more. This converts the first picture in the file, which is the one your Photos app shows you. The moving part of a Live Photo — the 1.5 seconds your iPhone records either side of the shot — travels as a separate video file, so it was never inside the HEIC to convert.

The reason nothing survives is not a setting we chose. Your photo is drawn onto a canvas in the page, and the browser writes a new file out of it; the HTML Standard says that file holds the bitmap’s pixel data, a resolution and a colour profile — a canvas has pixels and nothing else to write down. Read on 5 September 2026, and checked rather than assumed: we converted a real iPhone photo carrying coordinates, a capture time and a camera model, then read the produced files back. Chrome wrote a colour profile and no other metadata, Firefox wrote none, and Safari wrote a 76-byte block holding three things — the colour space and the width and height in pixels. No browser wrote a location.

The one limit that is not the same everywhere is the middle one, and it is worth saying why. Safari opens a HEIC with the same decoder your Photos app uses. Chrome and Firefox open it in JavaScript, and that needs the compressed file, the decoder’s working memory, and a full uncompressed copy of the picture all at once — which on a phone is not a slow page but a tab that closes itself. So a photo over that size is refused with a sentence, in the browsers where it would otherwise stall.

Once your photo is a JPG, the social media image resizer will cut it to every size Instagram, Facebook and LinkedIn ask for, in the same browser and with nothing uploaded either. For a batch of JPG, PNG or WebP files, use the image format converter.