HEIC to JPG Converter | Free, Nothing Uploaded

An iPhone saves its photographs as HEIC, which holds the same picture as a JPEG in less space. The trouble starts when the photo leaves the phone: Windows needs a paid extension to show one, Chrome, Firefox and Edge cannot open one at all, and most upload forms turn them away. Choose your HEIC files here and each one comes back as a JPG that everything opens. Choose forty at once and they come back as forty, with a ZIP of the lot.

The other HEIC converters upload your photographs to their server, convert them there and send them back. This one decodes them in this tab, with libheif, the same open source decoder GIMP and most Linux photo viewers use, compiled to run in the browser. The page is served with a rule that forbids it from opening a connection to anywhere, so the photos of your children, your flat and your documents stay on the computer they are on. Turn the network off and it still works.

Three things are handled that a quick conversion usually gets wrong. The colours: an iPhone shoots in Display P3, a wider range than the sRGB a plain JPEG is assumed to be in, so its colour profile is copied into the JPG and reds and greens do not come out dull. The orientation: the picture is turned upright and the tag that says which way is up is reset, so no viewer turns it a second time. And the details: the date, the camera and the exposure are kept, so the photos still sort by when they were taken, but the GPS position is taken out unless you ask for it, because a JPG gets shared far more freely than the HEIC it came from.

If you want the photos to take less space rather than less trouble, keep the HEIC: converting never makes a photograph smaller or better, only easier to open. On the iPhone itself, Settings, Camera, Formats, Most Compatible makes the camera shoot JPEG from now on, and Settings, Photos, Transfer to Mac or PC, Automatic converts them as they are copied to a computer by cable.

How to use it

Pick JPG or PNG, a quality, and which photo details to keep. The defaults suit most photos.
Choose one or more HEIC files. Nothing is uploaded: they are decoded in this tab.
Download each photo, or all of them as one ZIP.
Changed a setting afterwards? Press Convert again and the same photos are redone.

Questions

Are my photos uploaded?

No. They are decoded by libheif running as WebAssembly inside this tab, turned into a JPG by your own browser, and offered back to you as a download from memory. The page is served with a security policy that forbids it from opening any network connection, so it could not send them anywhere if it tried. Disconnect and convert, and you will see it makes no difference.

Why can't I open HEIC files on Windows or in Chrome?

HEIC pictures are compressed with HEVC, the video codec also called H.265, and its patents are licensed for a fee. Apple pays it and Safari opens HEIC; Microsoft sells it as an extension in the Store, and Chrome, Firefox and Edge do not include a decoder at all. A JPG has no such problem, which is why converting is the usual answer.

Will the JPG look worse than the HEIC?

At the default quality of 90, not in any way you will see. JPEG needs more bytes than HEIC for the same picture, so the JPG usually comes out a little larger than the file it came from: a 2.9 MB iPhone photo became 3.9 MB at 90 in testing, and 2.3 MB at 80, which still looks the same on a screen. Below 70, skies and skin start to show blocks.

Does it keep the date the photo was taken?

Yes, by default. The date, the camera model, the lens and the exposure settings are copied into the JPG, so it sorts in a photo library by when it was taken rather than when it was converted. Choose Remove all under Photo details to leave everything out.

What happens to the location?

It is left out unless you choose Keep all, with the location. An iPhone writes the position a photo was taken at to within a few metres, and a photo taken at home carries your address. Leaving it out removes it from the file outright, not just from view. The EXIF viewer will show you what any photo still carries.

Why do other converters make my photos look dull?

Because they drop the colour profile. An iPhone records colour in Display P3, which reaches deeper reds and greens than sRGB, and the file says so. A converter that decodes the numbers and writes them into a JPEG without that note has them read as sRGB, and every colour comes out a little washed out. The profile is copied across here, so the JPG looks the way it did on the phone.

Can it convert Live Photos or burst shots?

The still picture, yes. A Live Photo is a HEIC and a separate short video, and the HEIC converts like any other; the video is a .MOV that stays as it is. A file holding several pictures, like some bursts, gives the one marked as the main image, which is the one the phone shows.

Is there a limit on how many photos?

No fixed one. Each photo is decoded, converted and released before the next, so memory does not grow with the batch. A 12 megapixel photo took under a second on a laptop in testing, so a hundred take a minute or two; a phone is slower.

HEIC, JPG and PNG side by side

	HEIC	JPG	PNG
Compression	Lossy, HEVC	Lossy	Lossless
Size, for a 12 MP phone photo	2.9 MB	3.9 MB at quality 90, 2.3 MB at 80	20 MB
Opens in Windows Photos	With a paid extension	Yes	Yes
Opens in Chrome, Edge, Firefox	No	Yes	Yes
Accepted by upload forms	Rarely	Almost always	Usually
Wide colour (Display P3)	Yes	Yes, with the profile kept	Yes, with the profile kept
Date, camera, location	Yes	Yes, as EXIF	Yes, as EXIF, less widely read
Best for	Storing on the phone	Sharing, uploading, printing	Editing without further loss

For nearly everyone the answer is JPG: it is what the photo would have been if the iPhone had been set to Most Compatible. HEIC to PNG is for a photo you are about to edit, where every save as JPG would lose a little more, and for the rare HEIC with a transparent background.

Your data stays on your device

Everything above runs inside your browser as WebAssembly compiled from Rust. Nothing you type is uploaded, logged or stored on a server. You can load this page once, go offline, and it still works.

This page makes no requests at all, to anywhere. That is not a promise in the copy: it is a Content-Security-Policy header your browser enforces, and connect-src on it is none. Open the network tab and watch nothing happen.