HEIC Converter

What is HEIC?

HEIC (High Efficiency Image Container) is Apple’s name for HEIF images compressed with HEVC, the video codec also known as H.265. Since iOS 11, iPhones save photos as HEIC by default because the files are roughly half the size of JPG at the same quality. Many Android phones offer the format too, and cameras such as Sony and Canon write HEIF with 10-bit colour. A HEIC file is a container: besides the main image it can hold a thumbnail, a depth map for Portrait mode, a transparency plane, several images of a burst or a stereo pair, and EXIF and XMP metadata including the GPS position.

Why convert HEIC?

HEIC is great on Apple devices, but many places still expect JPG: Windows without extra codecs, older Android phones, web forms, online shops, office documents and printing services. Converting to JPG solves this for photos; PNG gives lossless files for editing; WebP makes small images for websites; PDF combines photos into one document. To shrink files for e-mail, compress HEIC to a smaller size and quality. Before you send photos, check what they reveal in the HEIC viewer and remove the location with the metadata remover.

How these tools work

Every tool reads the HEIF structure with our own code – grids of 512 × 512 tiles that iPhones use, rotation, mirroring and crop, colour profiles such as Display P3, alpha planes and multi-image files – and passes the compressed image data to the HEVC decoder of your operating system through the browser (WebCodecs, or Safari’s own HEIC support). The result is encoded to JPG, PNG or WebP by the browser. No photo is sent to a server, and we never ship our own HEVC decoder: the codec is patent-licensed, and your device already has a licensed one. That is also why a browser without HEVC access, such as Firefox, cannot decode HEIC here – the page tells you right away and lists browsers that work.