Four free ways to get a JPG out of an iPhone photo, and how to stop the iPhone making HEIC files in the first place.
iPhones save photos as HEIC by default. On the phone that is fine: the photos look the same and take less space. The trouble starts when you send one somewhere else. A job portal, a visa form, a school upload button or an older Windows laptop may refuse the file, show a blank thumbnail, or say the format is not supported. Most of those places want JPG.
HEIC is Apple's name for photos stored in the HEIF format (High Efficiency Image File Format). It uses a newer compression method than JPEG, so a photo of similar visual quality usually takes noticeably less space. Apple made it the default camera format in iOS 11. The file can also hold extras such as depth data for Portrait mode.
JPEG is more than thirty years old and opens almost everywhere: every browser, every email client, every upload form. HEIC support is good inside Apple's world and patchy outside it. That gap is the whole reason people search for a converter.
If you often send photos to forms or to people on Windows, change the camera format once:
New photos are then saved as JPG (and videos as H.264). Photos you already took stay HEIC, so you still need one of the options below for those. The cost is storage: JPG files are bigger, so the phone fills up faster. Some high frame rate video modes also need the High Efficiency setting.
Go to Settings > Photos and, under Transfer to Mac or PC, choose Automatic. When you import photos over a USB cable, the iPhone hands over JPG copies to computers that may not read HEIC. Your library on the phone stays in HEIC. If you choose Keep Originals instead, you get the HEIC files as they are.
This setting covers cable transfers. Photos that reach a computer another way, such as a cloud download or a messaging app, may still arrive as HEIC, depending on the service.
Mac. Open the photo in Preview, choose File > Export, set Format to JPEG, pick a quality and save. You can select several photos in Preview and export them together. The Photos app can also export a selection as JPEG with File > Export.
Windows 10 and 11. Windows needs Microsoft's HEIF Image Extensions to open HEIC files. It is free in the Microsoft Store, and some PCs already have it. Once it is installed, the Photos app shows the picture, and Paint can open it and save it with Save as > JPEG picture. If a HEIC still will not open, the PC may also need the HEVC Video Extensions from the Store.
This is the quickest way when you are on a computer that cannot open the file and you just need a JPG for one upload.
How it works, plainly: the photo is uploaded over HTTPS, converted on our server to a JPEG at quality 90, sent back to you, and not kept after the response. No account is needed. The JPG it makes does not carry the original camera data (EXIF), so the camera model, the date taken and any GPS location are not in the new file. That is usually what you want before posting a photo publicly. If you need the date taken for your own records, keep the original HEIC.
If you would rather not upload a personal photo at all, Options 1 to 3 do the job entirely on your own devices. Our note on whether free online tools are safe explains what to check on any converter.
Changing the file name only changes the label. The bytes inside are still HEIC, so the upload form or image viewer fails as soon as it tries to read them, sometimes with a confusing "corrupt file" message. A real conversion decodes the image and writes it again as JPEG.
Converting means re-compressing, so the JPG is not bit-for-bit the same picture. At quality 90 the difference is very hard to see in normal photos. Expect the JPG to be larger than the HEIC, because JPEG compresses less efficiently. If a form has a size limit, run the JPG through the image compressor afterwards, or use a preset such as compress an image under 200 KB. Converting and compressing are two separate steps.
A Live Photo is a still HEIC image plus a short video clip stored next to it. Converting gives you a JPG of the still image only; the motion is not included. For bursts, pick the frames you actually need and convert those. If you edited a photo on the iPhone, export or share the edited version first, so the JPG shows your edit and not the original.
Our converter handles one photo per run. For a large batch, Option 2 (Automatic transfer) or Preview on a Mac is faster.
For storage on the phone, yes: smaller files at similar quality. For sharing and uploading, JPG is safer because it opens everywhere. The JPEG vs PNG vs WebP guide covers when each format makes sense.
Check the size limit and the pixel dimensions the form asks for. The image format converter handles PNG, WebP and other formats, and resize and crop fixes dimensions.