HEIC to JPG

What HEIC is, and why Apple uses it

HEIC is Apple's name for an image stored in the HEIF container using HEVC compression — the same family of technology that powers modern 4K video. Its headline advantage is efficiency: a HEIC photo typically occupies about half the space of an equivalent-quality JPG, which is precisely why Apple switched the default in iOS 11. On a phone holding thousands of photos, halving the storage is enormous. HEIC also supports genuinely useful things JPG cannot, including 16-bit colour depth, transparency, and bundling multiple images in one file, which is how Live Photos and burst shots are stored. The catch is age: JPG has been universal since the 1990s, and HEIC is still working its way into the long tail of software.

The compatibility problem in practice

The friction usually shows up at the worst moment — uploading a photo to a job application, a government portal, an insurance claim, or an older content management system, and being told the file type is not supported. It also appears when you email photos to someone on Windows and they simply cannot open the attachment. The pragmatic approach most people land on is to leave the iPhone shooting in HEIC, keeping the storage benefit, and convert to JPG only at the point of sharing. If you would rather sidestep the issue permanently, iOS can be told to shoot JPG directly: Settings, then Camera, then Formats, then choose 'Most Compatible' — at the cost of roughly double the storage per photo.