You take a photo on an iPhone, mail it to someone with an Android phone or try to open it on an office PC, and the file refuses to display. Nothing is broken. The phone saved the picture in a format that most of the world still cannot read, and the fix is a conversion you can do in under a minute without sending your photos to a stranger’s website.
This is a working reference: what the format is, how to stop producing it if you would rather not deal with it, and the exact steps on each platform for converting one file or a whole folder while keeping dates and filenames intact.
What a HEIC file actually is, and why the photo will not open
“HEIC” is the file extension you see when a photo is stored as HEVC-compressed image data inside an HEIF container. Two acronyms doing two jobs: HEIF is the container, HEVC is the compression, and the extension is a shorthand for the combination. It is a genuinely better format than JPEG on the numbers — roughly half the file size for comparable quality, with support for 10-bit colour, HDR and depth data — which is exactly why Apple switched to it by default in 2017.
The problem is licensing and age. Browsers were slow to add support, Windows needs a codec pack that is not installed by default on every machine, and older Android builds cannot decode it at all. When you upload a HEIC to a site that does not handle it, or open it in an image viewer from a decade ago, you get a blank tile or an error rather than a picture. The format reference on HEIF and HEIC is worth a skim if you want the container details.
Stop making new ones: the one setting worth changing
On an iPhone, open Settings, go to Camera, then Formats, and choose Most Compatible. New photos will be captured as JPEG and new videos as H.264, which every device on earth can open. The trade-off is file size: expect roughly double the storage per photo, which matters if you shoot a lot and your phone is already full.
If storage is the reason you are on the efficient setting, change the habits instead of the format — the guides on freeing up iPhone storage and organising phone photos before storage runs out both cover the parts that actually reclaim space. Keeping HEIC and converting on demand is a perfectly sane policy; the mistake is discovering the incompatibility at the moment you need to send something.
Four ways to convert HEIC photos without uploading them
Online converters are popular because they are one click. They are also the worst option: you are handing full-resolution personal photos to an unknown server, often with no clear deletion policy, in exchange for saving thirty seconds. Every method below runs on hardware you already own. Pick by where the files are now, not by which article you landed on.
On iPhone or iPad: the share sheet does it quietly
When you share a HEIC photo from the Photos app to Mail, Messages or most third-party apps, iOS converts it to JPEG automatically and the recipient never sees the original format. That is why the same photo “works” when texted and “fails” when copied off the phone through a file manager.
To get a JPEG file rather than a converted share, use the Files app: select the photo in Photos, tap Share, choose Save to Files, then in Files long-press the saved image and pick Convert Image — on current iOS versions this offers JPEG, PNG or HEIF. For a batch, build a one-action Shortcut: Select Photos → Convert Image (set to JPEG) → Save to Files. Run it once on fifty photos and you have a folder of JPEGs with the same names and creation dates.
If the destination is a Windows PC, the shortest path is often not conversion at all but transfer: copy the originals over and convert in bulk on the PC, where you can see what you are doing. The options are compared in transferring files from phone to PC.
On a Mac: three levels of effort
For one file, open it in Preview and choose File → Export, then pick JPEG and set the quality slider. Preview reads HEIC natively, so this works even when Finder shows a generic icon.
For a folder, Terminal is faster than any app. Change into the directory and run a loop that converts every HEIC beside its original:
for f in *.HEIC *.heic; do sips -s format jpeg -s formatOptions 90 "$f" --out "${f%.*}.jpg"; done
sips is the system image tool, it preserves the embedded colour profile and EXIF, and it does not touch the originals. Raise or lower formatOptions between 60 and 100 to trade size for quality. To convert a whole Photos library with metadata intact, use Photos itself: select the items, then File → Export → Export Photos, and choose JPEG with “Include location information” if you want the GPS tags kept.
On Windows: install the codec once, then batch
Windows can display HEIC only if the HEIF Image Extensions package is installed, and opening them in some apps also needs the HEVC Video Extensions. Both come from the Microsoft Store; install the HEIF package first and test by double-clicking a file. Apple’s own note on the format is at Apple’s HEIF support page, and it is the least confusing official summary of what the file is.
Once the codec is in place, open the files in Photos and use Save a copy to write a JPEG. For a folder, the practical route is a small script rather than clicking through a hundred files: PowerShell can call the installed imaging components, or you can use a free batch converter that runs locally. What you should not do is rename .HEIC to .jpg and hope — the bytes inside are still HEVC, and you have created a file that lies about its own format, which breaks uploads and confuses every program that trusts the extension.
What you lose in the conversion
JPEG has no room for some of what HEIC carries. Expect to lose the live-photo pairing, the HDR gain map that makes a modern iPhone photo look right on an HDR display, and any depth data used for portrait-mode re-editing. Standard EXIF — date taken, camera model, exposure, GPS if enabled — survives in all of the methods above, and so does the colour profile, provided the converter is not a stripped-down web tool.
That is another argument for keeping the originals. Convert copies, archive the HEICs, and never make the JPEG your only version of a photo you care about. If the archive is what matters, the storage and naming system in this photo-organising routine will keep both versions straight.
A folder workflow that does not lose dates
Copy the originals into a folder named for the event or month, convert into a sibling folder called jpg, and leave the source untouched. Most converters write the file’s creation date from the moment of conversion, which destroys chronological sorting; sips and Photos’ export preserve the embedded capture date, and most batch tools have an option to keep the original timestamp — check for it. Rename with a date-first pattern so a plain alphabetical sort is also a chronological sort, for example 2026-10-31-1432.jpg.
Do one test file before running the batch. Open the result at 100 percent, check it is not upside down (an orientation flag that gets dropped is a classic), confirm the date is the capture date, and only then run the rest.
When keeping HEIC is the right answer
If your photos live on Apple devices, get backed up to iCloud, and are shared through apps that convert on the way out, converting everything is wasted effort and wasted space. Keep the efficient format, learn the two paths above for the moments that need a JPEG, and set Most Compatible only when you know you will be handing files to Windows or Android users regularly. The format is not the problem; the surprise is.