Why your phone does this
Apple switched to HEIC in 2017 because it stores the same photograph in roughly half the space of JPG. On the phone that is straightforwardly good: more photos per gigabyte, at better quality.
The problem starts when the file leaves the phone. Windows needs an extension from the Microsoft Store, Chrome and Firefox will not display it, and a large share of upload forms — job applications, marketplaces, government portals — reject the extension without explanation.
JPG is the right target almost every time. It is what upload forms, print services, older Windows software and every website accept without argument.
Stopping it at the source
If this keeps happening, change the setting rather than converting every time: Settings → Camera → Formats → Most Compatible. The phone then shoots JPG directly. You lose some storage efficiency and gain never thinking about this again.
Photos already on the device stay HEIC, which is what this page is for.
What does not survive the conversion
- Live Photo motion — the short video alongside the still is separate data
- Depth map — what portrait mode uses to blur the background
- EXIF — camera, lens, timestamp and GPS
- HDR gain map — the extra layer that makes highlights bright on newer displays
Keep the originals if any of that matters. Conversion is for producing a file someone else can open, not for replacing your library.
Everything happens on your device
The decoder is WebAssembly running in this tab. Your photographs are never uploaded, which is worth stating plainly: most free HEIC converters online work by receiving your files on a server.
Questions
Why will nothing open my iPhone photos?+
Because HEIC is an Apple default that the rest of the computing world adopted slowly. Apple devices handle it natively; Windows needs an extension, Chrome cannot display it at all, and a great many upload forms reject it outright. The photo is fine — the format is just inconvenient outside Apple's ecosystem.
Are my photos uploaded anywhere?+
No. HEIC decoding runs in this tab through a WebAssembly build of libheif, and the re-encoding uses your browser's canvas. Nothing is sent to a server, which matters more here than for most conversions — these are usually personal photographs.
Why is the first conversion slower?+
Because your browser has to download the HEIC decoder, which is about 3 MB of WebAssembly. It is fetched only when a HEIC file actually appears, so no other page on this site pays for it, and subsequent conversions in the same session are fast.
What happens to Live Photos and depth data?+
Only the still image survives. A Live Photo's video component, the depth map behind portrait mode, and any burst frames are all separate data that these formats cannot carry. If you need them, keep the original.
Is EXIF preserved?+
No. The conversion produces a new file from decoded pixels, so camera model, timestamps and GPS coordinates do not carry over. That is usually welcome when publishing a photo — holiday pictures routinely contain the coordinates of the house they were taken in — and worth knowing if you needed them.