8 Ways to Convert HEIC to JPG (iPhone, Mac, Windows and Batch)

You emailed some photos and the recipient could not open them. Or a web form rejected them. Or Windows showed grey rectangles where the thumbnails should be. The files end in .heic, and you want JPGs.

The conversion itself is easy, and every platform can do it without installing anything. Two things are worth knowing before you start: your files will get about twice as large, and the conversion quietly discards more than you think. This guide covers eight methods, and both of those trade-offs.

Pick Your Method First

#	Method	Where	Batch?	Install?
1	Change the camera setting	iPhone	Prevents the problem	No
2	Browser converter	Anywhere	Yes	No
3	Shortcuts	iPhone, iPad	Yes	No
4	Finder Quick Actions	macOS	Yes	No
5	sips	macOS	Yes	No
6	Photos and Paint	Windows	No	Maybe
7	ImageMagick or libheif	Any	Yes	Yes
8	Online converters	Anywhere	Yes	No

What HEIC Is, in One Paragraph

HEIC is a still image compressed with HEVC — the same codec as 4K video — inside a HEIF container. Apple made it the default on iPhone in 2017 because it reaches roughly half the file size of JPEG at the same visual quality. It also stores things JPEG cannot: 10 bits per channel instead of 8, an HDR gain map, a depth map from Portrait mode, image sequences, and edits kept separately from the original.

The container is the reason for your problem. Chrome and Firefox do not decode HEIC, most upload forms reject it, and plenty of software has never heard of it. Safari and the Apple ecosystem handle it fine, which is why the files look normal until they leave.

What You Lose in the Conversion

Converting to JPG is not a rename. It is a decode and a re-encode, and these things do not survive it:

• The bit depth. 10 bits per channel become 8. On a smooth sky or a gradient, subtle banding can appear where the original was smooth.
• HDR. iPhone HEICs carry a gain map that makes highlights genuinely bright on an HDR display. A standard JPEG has no place to put it, so the photo renders flat by comparison. Our HDR images guide covers the newer formats that can carry it.
• The depth map. Portrait mode photos keep a depth channel that lets you re-edit the blur later. It is gone.
• A generation of quality. You are re-compressing already compressed data. At quality 90 or above nobody will see it; at the default settings of some converters, they might.
• About half your storage. Encoding one image to HEIC and then converting it back out shows the cost directly:

At quality 95 — the setting you want if you are deleting the originals — the JPEG is two and a half times the size of the HEIC it replaced. At quality 85 it is roughly break-even on size, but you have now stacked a second lossy pass on the image. A full camera roll converted this way needs a great deal more space than the one it came from.

None of that means you should not convert. It means you should keep the originals and treat the JPGs as a distribution copy, exactly as you would with a RAW file.

1. Stop Making Them in the First Place

The best conversion is the one you do not have to do. Two settings control this, and most people only know the first.

Shoot JPEG instead of HEIC:

Settings → Camera → Formats → Most Compatible

New photos are captured as JPEG. Existing HEICs are untouched. The cost is roughly double the storage per photo, and you lose 10-bit capture. ProRAW and 4K/60 video still need High Efficiency, so the phone will occasionally override you.

Convert automatically when transferring to a computer:

Settings → Photos → scroll to Transfer to Mac or PC → Automatic

This is the setting almost nobody finds, and it solves the problem better than the first one. The phone keeps shooting efficient HEICs, saving space, and converts them to JPEG on the way out whenever you plug into a computer or import. Set to Keep Originals, it sends the HEIC untouched, which is what most people have and why they end up here.

Set this once and the majority of “how do I convert HEIC” situations never happen again.

2. A Browser Converter

Nothing to install, and it works from a Chromebook, a work laptop or a phone.

HEIC to JPG runs the decode in your browser through WebAssembly. The photos are never uploaded, which for a camera roll matters more than usual — phone photos carry GPS coordinates, and a set of them maps out where you live. See our metadata and privacy guide for what else is in there.

Related conversions from the same source:

• HEIC to PNG, when you need lossless
• HEIC to WebP, for the web rather than for compatibility
• HEIC to PDF, for paperwork photographed on a phone

When This Is the Right Answer

• A handful of photos and no desire to learn anything
• A machine you cannot install software on
• You want the files to stay on your own device

3. Shortcuts on iPhone and iPad

The on-device batch method, and the one that surprises people with how well it works.

Build it once:

1. Open Shortcuts → +
2. Add Select Photos, and turn on Select Multiple
3. Add Convert Image, set the format to JPEG
4. Turn on Preserve Metadata if you want dates and location kept
5. Add Save to Photo Album, or Save File to write into Files or iCloud Drive
6. Name it “HEIC to JPG” and save

Running it lets you pick any number of photos and writes JPEGs. Add it to the Share Sheet in the shortcut’s settings and it appears whenever you share photos from anywhere.

Two useful additions:

• Insert Resize Image before the conversion to cap the long edge at, say, 2000 pixels. That is how you get 40 photos under an email attachment limit in one pass.
• Insert Remove Metadata for photos going to strangers, which strips the GPS coordinates along with everything else.

This is the only method here that runs on the phone, needs no computer, and handles hundreds of files.

The Quick One-Off

If you only need a single photo converted right now: open it in Photos, tap Edit, make any change, tap Done, then undo it. That is folklore and it does not reliably produce a JPEG. Use the Shortcut, or just email the photo to yourself — Mail converts attachments to JPEG when the recipient’s device may not read HEIC.

4. Finder Quick Actions on macOS

Since macOS Monterey, the batch converter is built into the right-click menu and nobody mentions it.

1. Select any number of HEIC files in Finder
2. Right-click → Quick Actions → Convert Image
3. Choose JPEG
4. Choose an image size — Actual Size keeps the resolution
5. Tick Preserve Metadata to keep EXIF, dates and location
6. Click Convert to JPEG

The JPEGs appear alongside the originals. Several hundred files at once is not a problem.

This is the correct answer for most Mac users, and it needs nothing installed. Preview’s File → Export works too, one file at a time, but there is no reason to use it when the Finder route exists.

5. sips on macOS

Built into every Mac, no Homebrew required, and scriptable.

# One file
sips -s format jpeg photo.heic --out photo.jpg

# With a quality setting: low, normal, high, best, or 1-100
sips -s format jpeg -s formatOptions 90 photo.heic --out photo.jpg

# A whole folder, keeping the original names
mkdir -p jpg
for f in *.heic *.HEIC; do
  [ -e "$f" ] || continue
  sips -s format jpeg -s formatOptions 90 "$f" --out "jpg/${f%.*}.jpg"
done

# Convert and cap the long edge at 2000 pixels in the same pass
sips -s format jpeg -s formatOptions 85 -Z 2000 photo.heic --out photo.jpg

sips keeps EXIF metadata, including the capture date and GPS, and applies the orientation correctly. -Z resizes the longest edge while preserving the aspect ratio, which is almost always what you want.

For thousands of files, run it in parallel:

ls *.heic | xargs -P 8 -I {} sips -s format jpeg {} --out jpg/{}.jpg

6. Windows Photos and Paint

Modern Windows 11 installs generally open HEIC out of the box. Where they do not, you see grey placeholder thumbnails and a prompt to install HEIF Image Extensions from the Microsoft Store, which is free. Some machines additionally need HEVC Video Extensions to decode the image data; Microsoft charges a small amount for that package, although many laptop manufacturers pre-license it, so check whether yours is already installed before paying.

Once the codec is present:

Photos app — open the HEIC, click ⋯ → Save as, choose JPG.

Paint — open the HEIC, then File → Save as → JPEG picture. Paint strips all metadata, which is either a bug or a feature depending on whether you wanted the GPS coordinates gone.

Neither does batches. Windows has no built-in bulk image converter, so for a camera roll use method 2 or method 7. Do not sit through a hundred Save-as dialogs.

Where the Files Actually Are

A common Windows confusion: importing from an iPhone over USB gives HEICs, but downloading the same photos from iCloud.com gives JPEGs, because iCloud converts on download. If you only need a few, that is the shortest path on Windows and involves no software at all.

7. ImageMagick and libheif

The cross-platform, scriptable, thousands-of-files answer.

libheif is the reference decoder, and heif-convert is its command-line tool:

# Install
sudo apt install libheif-examples   # Debian/Ubuntu
brew install libheif                # macOS

# One file
heif-convert photo.heic photo.jpg

# Quality, 0-100
heif-convert -q 92 photo.heic photo.jpg

# A folder
for f in *.heic; do heif-convert -q 92 "$f" "${f%.heic}.jpg"; done

Note that heif-convert writes every image in the container. A Live Photo or a burst produces several numbered outputs from one input, which is either helpful or confusing depending on what you expected.

ImageMagick is more convenient if you want to resize or adjust at the same time:

# Check HEIC support is compiled in — look for "heic" in the list
magick -list format | grep -i heic

# One file
magick photo.heic -quality 92 photo.jpg

# A folder, writing new files next to the originals
magick mogrify -format jpg -quality 92 *.heic

# Convert, resize and strip location data in one pass
magick mogrify -format jpg -quality 88 -resize 2000x2000\> -strip *.heic

# Keep the orientation right
magick mogrify -format jpg -auto-orient -quality 92 *.heic

If magick -list format shows no HEIC entry, your build lacks the delegate. On Ubuntu install libheif-dev and use the distribution package, or use heif-convert instead.

For very large jobs, our batch processing guide covers parallelism and error handling properly.

In Python

# pip install pillow pillow-heif
from PIL import Image
import pillow_heif

pillow_heif.register_heif_opener()

image = Image.open("photo.heic")
image.save("photo.jpg", "JPEG", quality=92, exif=image.info.get("exif"))

Registering the opener makes Pillow treat HEIC like any other format, so existing Pillow code starts working on iPhone photos without further changes.

8. Online Converters

They work, they are free, and they are the wrong tool for a camera roll.

Every photo you upload carries EXIF: the exact GPS coordinates, the timestamp, and the device serial. A batch of family photos uploaded to a free converter is a map of where you live, where your children go to school, and when the house is empty. That is not a hypothetical reading of the metadata — it is what the metadata literally contains.

If you use one anyway:

• Check whether files are deleted, and after how long
• Strip metadata first if the tool offers it
• Never use one for photographs of documents, cards or people who did not consent

Methods 2 to 7 all keep the file on your own machine. There is no capability an upload service adds that justifies the trade.

Which Quality Setting

Because this is a lossy-to-lossy conversion, the quality number matters more than usual. You are stacking a second round of compression on data that already has artifacts, and JPEG will spend bits faithfully reproducing HEVC’s artifacts.

Quality	Result
100	Wasteful. Huge files, no visible gain
92–95	Archival. Use when the HEIC will be deleted
85–90	The sensible default for sharing and printing
75–80	Web use, where the image will be resized anyway
Below 70	Visible on skin, sky and gradients

Default to 90 when you are keeping the originals, and 95 when you are not. Our understanding image compression guide explains why the numbers behave the way they do.

Do Not Convert to JPG for the Web

If the destination is a website rather than a person, JPG is the wrong target. You would be taking an efficient modern format and downgrading it to a 1992 one.

Convert to AVIF or WebP instead. Both are supported in every current browser, both are smaller than JPEG at the same quality, and AVIF handles the 10-bit data that HEIC actually contains.

# HEIC to AVIF, keeping the efficiency
heif-convert photo.heic photo.png && avifenc --min 20 --max 30 photo.png photo.avif

Serve a JPEG only as the fallback. Our HEIC on the web guide covers the serving strategy, and WebP vs AVIF vs JPEG XL covers choosing between the modern formats.

Summary

The Eight Methods

#	Method	Use it when
1	Camera and transfer settings	Do this first — it prevents the problem
2	Browser converter	Any platform, nothing installed, nothing uploaded
3	Shortcuts	Batches on the phone itself
4	Finder Quick Actions	The macOS answer, built in since Monterey
5	sips	Scripted macOS jobs, or resizing in the same pass
6	Photos and Paint	One or two files on Windows
7	ImageMagick or libheif	Thousands of files, any platform
8	Online converters	Photos you would be happy to publish

Checklist

1. ✅ Transfer to Mac or PC is set to Automatic, so this stops recurring
2. ✅ The original HEICs are kept, not overwritten
3. ✅ Quality is 90 or above unless the image is for the web
4. ✅ Metadata is preserved deliberately, or stripped deliberately
5. ✅ Orientation is handled, so nothing lands sideways
6. ✅ Location data is removed from anything shared publicly
7. ✅ Web destinations get AVIF or WebP, not JPG
8. ✅ Nothing private went through an upload service

Change the transfer setting, then use the Finder Quick Action on a Mac, the Shortcut on a phone, or the browser converter anywhere else. Those three cover almost every case without installing anything.