HEIC photos from your iPhone, and how to stop the problem at the source

You email photos from your iPhone, and the person on the other end says they will not open. The files end in .HEIC, nothing on their Windows machine recognises them, and everyone concludes something is broken. Nothing is broken — you have run into a format that Apple adopted and most of the rest of the computing world did not.

What HEIC is

HEIC (High Efficiency Image Container) has been the iPhone’s default photo format since iOS 11 in 2017. Technically it is very good: roughly half the size of a JPG at comparable quality, with support for depth information, Live Photos, and wider colour.

The problem is purely one of support. Apple’s devices handle it natively. Almost nothing else does — not most Windows software out of the box, not most Android phones, not many web uploaders, not most photo printing services. No browser except Safari can decode HEIC, which is why online converters that promise to handle it either upload your photos to a server or quietly fail.

The permanent fix: change one iPhone setting

If HEIC has caused you trouble once, it will again. Fix it at the source rather than converting forever.

Settings → Camera → Formats → Most Compatible

That is the whole fix. Your iPhone will shoot JPG from then on, and the compatibility problem disappears permanently.

The trade is real but small: JPGs take about twice the storage. On a modern iPhone, for photos you actually intend to share, that is almost always worth it.

There is a second setting worth knowing, because it causes a confusing variant of the same problem:

Settings → Photos → Transfer to Mac or PC → Automatic

Set to Automatic, your iPhone converts photos to JPG when transferring to a computer. Set to “Keep Originals,” it sends the HEIC untouched. If some transfers give you JPGs and others give you HEIC files, this setting is why.

Converting HEIC files you already have

Changing the setting does not help photos you have already taken. Those need converting, and your options depend on what you have to hand.

On a Mac. Open the photo in Preview, then File → Export, and choose JPEG. For a batch, select them all in Finder, right-click, and use Quick Actions → Convert Image.

On an iPhone. Airdropping to a Mac converts automatically. Otherwise, the simplest trick is to email the photo to yourself — Mail converts to JPG in the process. Cropping a photo in the Photos app and saving a copy also produces a JPG.

On Windows. Microsoft offers HEIF Image Extensions in the Microsoft Store, which teaches Windows to open HEIC files. Once installed, Photos can open them and export as JPG. Note that these have at times been a paid add-on, which many people reasonably object to.

Online. This is where you should be careful. Because browsers cannot decode HEIC, any web converter handling it must upload your photos to its server. For holiday snaps that may be fine. For anything personal, understand that you are sending original photographs, complete with their location metadata, to a company you know nothing about.

An honest note about our converter

We would like to be straightforward here, because it affects whether our tool is useful to you.

Our image converter does not currently support HEIC. Everything on PDFCasa runs inside your browser, and no browser but Safari can decode HEIC — so supporting it would mean either uploading your photos to us, which we will not do, or shipping a large WebAssembly decoder that would slow the tool down for everyone using it for anything else.

We are not willing to do the first. We may do the second once we can do it without penalising the common case. In the meantime, our converter will tell you plainly when it detects a HEIC file rather than failing mysteriously, and point you at the iPhone setting above — because for most people, that setting is a better fix than any converter.

Once your photos are JPGs, our converter and compressor will handle them without anything leaving your device.

Related things that confuse people

HEIC vs HEIF. HEIF is the standard; HEIC is Apple’s specific implementation of it. In practice the terms get used interchangeably.

Live Photos. A Live Photo is a still image plus a short video. Converting to JPG keeps the still and discards the motion. That is usually what you want when emailing someone, but it is not reversible, so keep the original.

Metadata. HEIC files carry EXIF data including GPS coordinates. Most conversions preserve it. If you are posting photos publicly, strip location data first — a photo of your living room can otherwise carry your home address.