HEIC to JPG

iPhones and recent Android phones save photos as HEIC, which many websites, printers, and older programs refuse to open. Drop the file here and you get a JPG back. You can also save it as PNG if you need a lossless copy.

How does the conversion work?

The HEIC file is decoded with libheif and libde265, compiled to WebAssembly, then re-encoded as JPG by the same codec Squoosh uses. Both steps run in a Web Worker, so a 4 MB photo converts in a couple of seconds and the page stays responsive. The decoder is about a megabyte of WebAssembly and only downloads once you pick a file, so opening this page costs nothing extra.

For JPG output there is a quality slider, set to 90 by default, which is high enough that phone photos keep their detail. PNG output has no slider because PNG compression is lossless. The saved file keeps the original name and swaps the extension, so IMG_0042.HEIC comes out as IMG_0042.jpg.

One thing worth knowing: HEIC can store 10 or 12 bits per color channel, and JPG cannot. Those photos are scaled down to the usual 8 bits, so a bright HDR shot can look a little flatter here than it does in the Photos app. Ordinary 8-bit HEIC files, which is most of them, convert without any loss beyond the JPG compression itself.

Are my photos uploaded to convert them?

No. Your browser reads the file, decodes it, and writes the JPG on your own machine. Nothing is sent anywhere, which is the main reason to avoid the upload sites that come up for this search. Re-encoding does drop the EXIF metadata the phone wrote into the original file, including the GPS coordinates of where the photo was taken. If you were planning to post the picture publicly, that is a bonus. If you needed the capture date, copy it out of the original first.

Which files does it accept?

Anything with a .heic, .heif, or .hif extension, which covers iPhone photos and the HEIF files Canon cameras write. Windows and some browsers report no file type at all for HEIC, so the file name is checked too. HEIC is Apple’s name for a HEIF file whose picture is compressed with HEVC.

Decoding uses libheif and libde265, both licensed under the LGPL-3.0.