HEIC to JPG

Why a HEIC will not open

Since 2017 an iPhone saves its photos as HEIC: the same picture at about half the weight of a JPG. Apple’s own devices read it. Windows without an add-on, many Android phones, most upload forms and older programs do not. JPG is read by all of them.

What is kept

• The picture at its full size in pixels (on an iPhone or iPad, a photo above about 16 megapixels is reduced to that, and the page says so), and the way up it was taken: the turn recorded in the file is applied.
• Its main picture, when a file holds more than one. The moving part of a Live Photo is a separate video file; it is not in the HEIC.
• Its colors, brought into the range a JPG holds: the wide colors of a recent iPhone (Display P3) are converted, and an HDR photo comes out in ordinary brightness.

What the camera wrote into the file (the place, the date, the device) is left out of the JPG. The JPG is usually heavier than the HEIC was, often about twice for an iPhone’s photo: that is the price of a format everything opens.

Where the decoding is done

On your device, in this tab. Safari reads HEIC by itself. Chrome, Edge and Firefox do not: the first time you drop a HEIC file there, this page fetches a decoder from this site (about half a megabyte) and runs it in your browser. Your photos are not sent anywhere.

The decoder is libheif, with libde265 (© Dirk Farin, struktur AG and contributors): free software under the GNU Lesser General Public License, version 3. It is served here unmodified, as files of its own; its notice says where its source is and how to put a build of your own in its place.