HEIC explained: why Apple uses it
HEIC is not a bug and not a lock-in scheme. It is a genuinely better format that arrived after everything else had already standardised on JPEG, which is exactly the problem.
Figures checked on 2026-09-11. Services change these without announcing it. If one of them is now wrong, it is wrong here too — the date is so you know how much to trust it.
What HEIC is
HEIC is a photograph stored inside a HEIF container, compressed with HEVC — the same technique used for 4K video. Apple switched the iPhone camera to it in iOS 11, in 2017, and it has been the default ever since.
The reason is compression. HEIC stores roughly the same picture as JPEG in about half the bytes, which on a phone that takes a thousand photos a year is a real difference. It also holds things JPEG cannot: 16-bit colour instead of 8, transparency, depth maps, and several images in one file, which is what makes Live Photos possible.
Why Windows and half the web cannot open it
JPEG is thirty years old and completely unencumbered. HEVC, the compression inside HEIC, is patented, and the licences are held by several companies at once. That is the whole story: a Windows machine can open HEIC only if someone has paid for the codec, which is why Microsoft ships the extension as a separate paid item in the Store.
Browsers are in the same position. Safari opens HEIC because Apple licensed it. Chrome and Firefox do not, which is why a website that asks for a photograph so often refuses the one straight off your phone.
Does converting HEIC to JPG lose quality?
Yes, a little, and less than people fear. Both are lossy, so going from one to the other decodes the picture and re-encodes it, and a re-encode always costs something. At a high quality setting the loss is not visible on a screen.
What is genuinely lost is what JPEG cannot carry: the 16-bit colour becomes 8-bit, transparency is flattened, and a Live Photo becomes one still frame. For an ordinary photograph destined for a form or a website, none of that matters. For an edited photograph you intend to keep editing, it does — keep the HEIC as the original.
Stopping your phone from making them in the first place
On an iPhone: Settings → Camera → Formats → Most Compatible. The camera goes back to JPEG, the photos take about twice the space, and nothing else changes.
There is also a setting that catches people out. Settings → Photos → Transfer to Mac or PC → Automatic converts HEIC to JPEG when you plug the phone into a computer, but only over the cable — AirDrop and sharing to an app still send the original HEIC. That is why a photo that arrived fine by cable yesterday arrives as HEIC today.
Convert one here
The conversion happens in this tab. The photograph is not uploaded, which for a photograph is worth saying out loud.