Convert HEIC to JPG — with the photo data still attached

Drop the HEIC files your iPhone produced and get ordinary JPGs that open anywhere. Unlike most converters, this one carries the capture date, camera model and location across into the JPG instead of quietly deleting them.

Drag & drop HEIC photos here

or — you can paste too

HEIC, HEIF, JPG, PNG, WebP, GIF, BMP · up to 40 images

Why your iPhone made a file nothing will open

Since iOS 11, iPhones save photos as HEIC by default rather than JPG. HEIC is a genuinely better format — it uses the HEVC video codec to store a still image, and typically produces a file around half the size of the equivalent JPG at the same visual quality. Apple switched because it saves an enormous amount of storage across a billion devices.

The problem is everything that is not Apple. Windows needs a paid codec pack from the Microsoft Store to show HEIC thumbnails. Most photo printing services reject the format outright. Older versions of Photoshop, most CMS upload forms, and a great many web apps simply do not recognise it. So you end up with a folder of photos your own computer treats as unopenable junk.

The part other converters get wrong

Search for a HEIC converter and you will find dozens. Try one and check the resulting JPG's properties: in most cases the Date Taken field is empty, the camera model is gone, and any GPS coordinates have vanished.

This happens for a technical reason. The standard way to convert an image in a browser is to draw it onto a canvas and export it. A canvas holds nothing but pixels — the moment the image is drawn, every piece of metadata attached to the original file ceases to exist. The exported JPG is therefore born blank.

That matters more than it sounds. Photo libraries sort by capture date, so metadata-stripped conversions all pile up under today's date instead of the day you took them. Years of holiday photos can end up in one undifferentiated heap.

This converter reads the Exif block directly out of the HEIC container before conversion, and splices it into the JPG afterwards. The capture date, camera, lens and GPS tags come through. If you would rather they did not — sharing a photo publicly is a good reason, since GPS tags can reveal exactly where a photo was taken — untick Keep photo metadata above and you will get a genuinely clean file.

One detail worth knowing about rotation

Photos carry an orientation flag describing how the camera was held. The pixel data is not rotated; viewers rotate it on the fly. When a converter mishandles this you get the classic sideways photo. Here the decoder applies the rotation to the actual pixels and then resets the flag to "normal", so the JPG is upright everywhere — including in software that ignores orientation flags entirely.

What quality setting to use

HEIC is already a compressed format, so converting to JPG means decoding one lossy format and re-encoding into another. You cannot recover detail HEIC discarded, and the JPG pass discards a little more. The quality slider decides how much.

The default here is 85 rather than the 80 used elsewhere on this site, precisely because of that double-compression. For photos you intend to keep, 85–90 is a sensible range. Below about 70 you will start to see blocking in skies and smooth skin tones, which is exactly where iPhone photos show artefacts most readily.

Expect the JPG to be noticeably larger than the HEIC — often roughly twice the size for the same picture. That is not the converter being wasteful; it is the storage saving that made Apple adopt HEIC in the first place, being given back.

Live Photos, bursts and edited shots

A few iPhone-specific cases behave in ways worth knowing about:

Live Photos are a still image plus a short video. Only the still frame converts; the motion is not part of the HEIC file.
Burst shots can store several images in one container. The primary image is converted and the rest are not extracted.
Photos edited in the Photos app keep the original plus a list of edits. What converts is whichever version your device exported — so export the edited version if that is the one you want.
Depth and portrait data is discarded. JPG has nowhere to put a depth map, so the blur is baked into the pixels as you see it.

How to stop your iPhone making HEIC files

If this keeps happening, fix it at the source: Settings → Camera → Formats → Most Compatible. Your iPhone will shoot JPG from then on. Photos already in your library stay HEIC, so you will still need this page for the backlog.

There is also Settings → Photos → Transfer to Mac or PC → Automatic, which is supposed to convert on transfer. It is unreliable in practice — plenty of people report HEIC files arriving on Windows regardless — so do not count on it.

Platform-specific guides

The compatibility problem plays out differently depending on what you're opening the file on. Each of these covers the specific cause and fix for that platform:

Related conversions

Common questions

Will the converted JPG keep the date the photo was taken?

Yes, as long as "Keep photo metadata" stays ticked. The Exif block is read out of the HEIC file and written into the JPG, so Date Taken, camera model, lens and GPS coordinates all survive. This is the main thing that separates this converter from most others, which drop all of it.

Why is my JPG bigger than the HEIC it came from?

Because HEIC is a more efficient format. It uses the HEVC codec and typically stores the same picture in about half the space JPG needs. Converting gives that advantage back in exchange for compatibility. Lowering the quality slider will bring the size down if you need it smaller.

Does converting HEIC to JPG lose quality?

A little, unavoidably. HEIC is lossy and JPG is lossy, so the image is compressed twice. At quality 85 the difference is not visible at normal viewing sizes. It only becomes obvious if you convert repeatedly or drop the quality below about 70.

Can I convert HEIC files on an iPhone or iPad?

Yes. Safari on iOS decodes HEIC natively, so conversion runs immediately and it never needs to download the extra decoder that other browsers require. Tap the drop area to pick photos from your library.

What about HEIF files — are they the same thing?

Effectively yes for this purpose. HEIF is the container format and HEIC is the common name for HEIF images encoded with HEVC. Both extensions are accepted here and handled identically.

How many HEIC photos can I convert at once?

Up to 40 per batch, with a 60 MB cap per file. That limit exists so phone browsers do not run out of memory, not to push you toward a paid tier — there is no paid tier. Run as many batches as you need, then use Download All to get them as a single zip.