Convert HEIC to JPG Free
Convert HEIC images from iPhone to standard JPG format instantly.
How to convert HEIC to JPG — 3 steps
- 1
Add your HEIC photos
Drop in the .heic or .heif files straight from your iPhone or a photo export. Whole camera rolls are fine — nothing is uploaded, so the batch size is limited by your device rather than a server.
- 2
Set the JPG quality
Around 85 keeps camera photographs looking like the original at a reasonable size. Push higher if the images are going to be printed or edited further.
- 3
Download the JPGs
Save the converted photos. They will open on essentially anything — Windows, Android, older software, and web forms that reject HEIC outright.
Why your iPhone photos will not open anywhere
HEIC is Apple's implementation of HEIF, the container that iPhones have used by default since iOS 11. It is genuinely a better format than JPG: it uses modern video-codec compression to store a photo at roughly half the file size for comparable quality, and it supports things JPG cannot, including transparency, 16-bit colour depth, and multiple images in a single file — which is how Live Photos and burst sequences are stored.
The problem is support, not quality. Windows does not display HEIC out of the box without a codec from the Microsoft Store, many Android devices and older applications cannot read it, and a great many web upload forms — job applications, insurance claims, government portals, print services — silently reject the file or fail to generate a preview. JPG is nearly thirty years old and is understood by everything, which is exactly why converting is so often the pragmatic answer.
That is the trade you are making: you give up some compression efficiency and Apple-specific features in exchange for a file that works everywhere. For a photo you need to submit, email, or hand to someone on a different platform, that is almost always the right call.
What happens to Live Photos, depth data, and EXIF
A HEIC file can hold more than one image. A Live Photo bundles a still frame with a short video clip; a Portrait-mode shot carries a depth map that lets editing apps adjust the background blur after the fact. JPG has no way to represent any of that, so conversion keeps the main still image and drops the rest. If the movement in a Live Photo matters to you, keep the original file as well.
EXIF metadata — the date the photo was taken, camera settings, and often GPS coordinates — is a separate matter, and worth thinking about before you share. Where it survives conversion, the location where a photo was taken travels with it, which is fine for a holiday snap and less fine for a picture taken at home that you are posting publicly. If that concerns you, strip the metadata after converting.
One practical note: if you want to avoid the conversion step entirely in future, iPhones can be told to capture in JPG directly. Settings › Camera › Formats › Most Compatible switches the camera to JPG permanently, at the cost of larger files on the device.
Your files never leave your device
The photos are decoded and re-encoded in your browser, which is the point for a camera roll — holiday, family, and personal pictures are converted without ever being handed to someone else's server.
Most online PDF sites upload your document to their servers, process it there, and keep a copy for minutes, hours, or longer. PilotPDF works differently: the page downloads a small processing engine into your browser, and your file is opened and edited in your device's memory using WebAssembly. Nothing is transmitted, so there is nothing for a server to store, leak, or scan. You can even disconnect from the internet after the page loads and the tool keeps working.
Read more about how this works in our privacy-by-design explainer.