HEIC Format

Convert HEIC Photos to JPG, PNG or WebP

Why does a photo taken thirty seconds ago on your iPhone refuse to open on your PC? It's not a bug. It's a format that half the web still can't read — and there's a way to convert it without installing anything.

7 min de lecture

What is the HEIC format

Since iOS 11 (2017), iPhone has recorded its photos in HEIC by default. HEIC and HEIF mean practically the same thing on iPhone: HEIF is the standard, HEIC is the name of the container Apple uses to implement it. Apple made this choice for two technical reasons: a more compact file at equivalent quality, and a container capable of storing multiple images in a single file (useful for Live Photos and bursts).

The problem doesn’t come from the format itself, but rather its recency on the web. JPEG dates from 1992: thirty years of integration into every existing software, system and website. HEIC, meanwhile, still has to carve its way into ecosystems that weren’t expecting it.

To compare HEIC with other available output formats, the complete guide to image formats in 2026 details JPEG, PNG, WebP and AVIF by each use case.

Why convert your HEIC photos

In practice, three situations come up most often:

• Windows without the right extensions: double-clicking a .heic file in Windows File Explorer might open a gray icon instead of the photo, depending on what extensions are installed.
• Social networks and messaging: WhatsApp Web and some forms refuse to upload .heic files or display them broken. Facebook and Instagram generally convert HEIC automatically when sending, but behavior varies by app and version.
• Websites and online stores: an application form, a Vinted product listing or a CMS that requires JPG or PNG simply rejects HEIC on submission.

How to convert a HEIC photo to JPG, PNG or WebP

Once the image is converted, it can be further reduced before publication: see how to compress an image without quality loss. To choose between JPG, PNG and WebP with confidence, this format comparison details which format suits which use case.

Do you lose quality during conversion?

Apple remains intentionally vague on the figure in its official documentation: it speaks of “better compression” and “less storage space” at equivalent visual quality, without a percentage. The figure most often cited by independent technical analyses, about 50% less weight than a comparable JPEG, doesn’t come from Apple itself. Converting HEIC to another format almost always implies re-encoding, with minimal quality loss if conversion is done at a reasonable compression level, much like converting an already-compressed JPEG to another JPEG.

If you convert to PNG, you don’t recover the pixels lost during the original HEIC compression, that can never be recovered, but you at least avoid any new loss during conversion itself, since PNG is lossless.

Convert multiple HEIC photos at once

An iPhone import rarely brings just one photo. Impmage supports batch processing: up to 10 images at once, HEIC or otherwise, mixed if needed. Each file is decoded and converted individually, and a ZIP groups the results at the end of processing.

One limit exists specifically for HEIC: beyond 24 megapixels per photo, decoding is refused to avoid saturating browser memory, especially on mobile. Recent iPhones typically photograph below this threshold, except for specific settings (ProRAW, certain high-resolution modes).

Disable HEIC format on iPhone

Converting after the fact isn’t the only option. iPhone can save directly to JPEG at the moment of capture:

Settings → Camera → Formats → select Most Compatible instead of High Efficiency.

This change applies to future photos, not photos already taken. In practice, this is the simplest solution if you regularly send photos to devices or services that don’t like HEIC, at the cost of a heavier file at equivalent quality since you lose HEIC’s compression efficiency.

XGlitchGhostX

Independent Developer

Passionate about web development and web publishing, I create Impmage among other things, a suite of image editing tools (compression, resizing, cropping, watermarking…) that runs 100% locally in the browser and respects your privacy.

Web DeveloperIndependentCreator of Impmage