What it does
Modern iPhones, and some Android phones and cameras, save photos as HEIC (also called HEIF). It is an efficient format, but Windows, many websites, older apps and most print services still want a plain JPG. This tool converts one photo or hundreds, and gives you each result as an ordinary JPG, or all of them in a zip.
Because the conversion is done by code that runs in your browser, the photos stay on your device. That matters more than usual here: a typical phone photo is a picture of your home, your family or your documents.
How it works
HEIC is a container for an image compressed with the HEVC video codec. Most browsers cannot display it, so we ship a decoder with the page: heic2any, a build of the open-source libheif library. The steps are:
- Your file is read from disk into memory. No network is involved.
- The decoder unpacks the HEVC data into raw pixels and applies the stored rotation.
- The pixels are encoded as a JPEG at the quality you picked with the slider.
- The result is shown with its size and a thumbnail, and offered as a download.
Files are converted one after another so your browser stays responsive and memory stays modest. If you change the quality after a batch, press Convert again at this quality to redo the list.
Choosing a quality
| Setting | Good for |
|---|---|
| 100% | Archiving or further editing. Largest files, and nothing is gained over ~95% in practice. |
| 85–90% (default) | Everyday sharing and printing. Visually indistinguishable from the original for nearly all photos. |
| 60–75% | Email attachments, web uploads with size limits. Fine on screen; fine detail starts to soften. |
| Below 50% | Thumbnails and previews. Blocky artefacts become visible in skies and gradients. |
A worked example
You return from a weekend away with 120 photos and your laptop does not show HEIC thumbnails. You drag the whole selection into the drop zone. The tool works through them in order, showing each file's progress: a 2.1 MB HEIC becomes a 3.0 MB JPG at 90%, and a 1.6 MB one becomes 2.4 MB (JPG files are usually larger than HEIC for the same picture). Then you click Download all (.zip) and get a single archive named quokkatools-heic-to-jpg.zip with 120 JPGs. Your next step might be to also drop a few of them in the metadata remover, but note that these JPGs are already free of the original EXIF data, as explained below.
Limits you should know about
- Metadata is not carried over. The decoder outputs pixels, so EXIF (date, camera, GPS) is not written to the JPG. That is a privacy plus, but it also means a viewer's "date taken" will be missing. Files keep their new modification date.
- Colour and HDR. Wide-gamut and 10-bit photos are converted to standard 8-bit sRGB JPEG, so very saturated or HDR images can look a touch flatter.
- Live Photos, depth maps and gain maps are not preserved. You get the still image only.
- Transparency is flattened because JPG has no alpha channel.
- Burst and multi-image HEIC files produce one JPG per image, named with a numeric suffix.
- Speed. Decoding is CPU-heavy and runs in your browser. Expect a second or two for each photo on a laptop, and longer on a phone. Giant batches can use a lot of memory; if the tab struggles, convert in smaller groups.
- HEIC only. AVIF and other formats are not handled by this converter.
Verify there are no uploads
You shouldn't have to take our word for it. This page is built so you can check in under a minute:
- Open your browser's developer tools (
F12, or⌥⌘Ion a Mac) and switch to the Network tab. - Tick Preserve log, then click the clear (🚫) button so the list is empty.
- Add your file and run the tool.
- Look at the list. You will see nothing new: no
POST, noPUT, no calls to any other domain. Your file is read from disk into memory and handed to code that was already loaded with this page. - For a stronger test, switch the Network tab's throttling to Offline (or turn on airplane mode) after the page has loaded, and use the tool again. It keeps working, because it never needed the network.
Note the converter itself is loaded when the page opens, not when you add a file, so adding photos causes no request at all. Every library is bundled into this site and served from the same domain. There are no CDNs, analytics scripts, fonts or trackers. Our full guide to verifying uploads covers Chrome, Firefox and Safari.
Frequently asked questions
Are my photos uploaded to be converted?
No. The decoder is bundled into this page and runs in your browser. Check the Network tab while you convert, or switch to offline mode after the page loads.
Is there a limit on how many files I can convert?
There is no fixed limit and no sign-up. The practical limit is your device's memory. Hundreds of ordinary phone photos are fine on a laptop.
Will I lose quality?
JPG is lossy, so a conversion is never perfect, but at 85–90% the difference is very hard to see. HEIC is itself lossy, and you only get a second round of compression.
Why is the JPG bigger than the HEIC?
HEIC uses a more efficient codec, so for the same visual quality it is often around half the size of JPG. Lower the quality slider if you need smaller files.
Does the JPG keep the location and date?
No. Metadata is not copied over, which means location is not leaked, but the "date taken" is lost too.
Can I turn off HEIC on my iPhone instead?
Yes: Settings → Camera → Formats → Most Compatible. New photos will be JPG. Existing photos still need converting.
Does this work offline?
Yes, once the page has loaded.