About HEIC
HEIC is Apple's name for images stored in HEIF, the High Efficiency Image File Format standardised by MPEG in 2015, using the HEVC (H.265) video codec for compression. iPhones switched to it by default with iOS 11 in 2017, roughly halving the space each photo takes.
HEVC is covered by patents with licensing fees, which is a large part of why HEIC never became a web format. Chrome and Firefox do not display it; recent Safari does. Windows needs extra extensions. Upload forms, print kiosks and many apps reject it outright.
Why convert, and to what
- JPG for sharing, emailing, uploading and printing. It opens everywhere.
- PNG for photos you will edit further, or screenshots saved as HEIC.
- WebP if the photos are going onto a website.
Converting cannot be done in reverse here: browsers have no HEIC encoder, and there is rarely a reason to create HEIC files outside an Apple device.
Metadata and location
iPhone photos often carry GPS coordinates. Converting through this page redraws the image and drops that metadata. To see what a photo contains first, open it in the EXIF viewer.
HEIC at a glance
| First released | 2015 |
|---|---|
| Compression | Lossy |
| Transparency | Possible, rarely used |
| Animation or pages | Bursts and Live Photos |
| Best for | Storing photos on phones |
| Support | Apple devices; patchy elsewhere |
Questions people ask
Can I convert JPG to HEIC?
Not here. Browsers cannot create HEIC files, and JPG, WebP or AVIF are better choices for anything outside an iPhone.
What is the difference between HEIC and HEIF?
HEIF is the container standard; HEIC is HEIF holding HEVC-compressed images. For photos from Apple devices the terms are used interchangeably.
Is HEIC better quality than JPG?
At the same file size, yes. It keeps more detail per byte.