How do I convert HEIC to JPG on Windows for free?

The simplest route needs no installation at all: open a converter that runs in the browser, such as this one, drop the files in and download the JPGs. Because the decoding happens inside the browser tab, it works the same on a locked-down work machine as on your own, and the photos are never uploaded. The alternative is buying Microsoft's HEVC Video Extensions from the Store, which teaches Windows itself to open HEIC files - useful if you deal with them constantly, but it only makes them viewable, and any form that wants a JPG will still want a JPG.

Does converting HEIC to JPG lose quality?

Technically yes, in the way any lossy re-encode does, but at a sensible quality setting it is not something you can see. The HEIC is decoded to exact pixels first, so nothing is lost in that step; the loss is in the JPEG encode that follows, and at the default 92% quality the difference from the original is invisible on a photograph even side by side. It only becomes visible if you push the quality slider low, or convert the same file back and forth repeatedly. If you genuinely need zero further loss - for archiving or editing - choose PNG instead and accept a file several times larger.

How do I stop my iPhone saving photos as HEIC?

Settings, then Camera, then Formats, and choose Most Compatible instead of High Efficiency. New photos will be saved as JPG from then on, at roughly double the storage cost, and existing HEICs on the phone stay as they are. There is also a middle option worth knowing about: leave the camera on High Efficiency and instead go to Settings, Photos, and under Transfer to Mac or PC choose Automatic, which converts photos to JPG as they are copied off the phone. That keeps the storage saving on the device and hands compatible files to everything else.

How to Convert HEIC to JPG

You email yourself some photos from an iPhone, open them on a Windows machine, and nothing happens. Or a job application refuses the file. Or a printing shop asks you to send them again "as normal photos". The files are HEICs, and the fix is a conversion to JPG - which takes seconds and does not need any software installed.

This guide covers what the format actually is, the quickest way to convert a batch, and the two things that surprise people afterwards: the JPG being bigger than the HEIC, and photos arriving sideways from some converters.

What a HEIC file is

HEIC is what iPhones and iPads have saved photos as by default since iOS 11 in 2017, under the Settings option called High Efficiency. The file is a HEIF container - the same family of container used by video files - holding a still image compressed with HEVC, also known as H.265. That is the same codec used for 4K video, applied to a single frame.

The efficiency is real and it is the whole point. HEVC gets roughly twice as much out of the same number of bytes as JPEG's much older compression does, which is how a phone fits twice as many photos in the same storage without a visible drop in quality. Apple did not invent it and it is not proprietary to Apple: HEIF is an MPEG standard, and Android has supported saving HEIC since Android 10.

Why so little will open them

Support is the price of that efficiency, and it splits along predictable lines:

Apple devices open them everywhere - Photos, Preview, Quick Look, Safari.
Windows will not, out of the box. Windows 11 ships the container support but not the HEVC decoder, which Microsoft sells separately in the Store. Double-clicking a HEIC on a fresh machine gets you an error or a prompt to buy a codec.
Web forms and uploaders mostly reject them. Anything that says "JPG or PNG only" means it, and government portals, job boards and photo printers are the usual places this bites.
Browsers do not display them. Chrome, Firefox and Edge have no HEIC decoder, so a HEIC will not render in an img tag even though it is a perfectly valid image file.

So the practical answer, whenever a file has to leave the Apple ecosystem, is to convert it. JPG is thirty years old and universally understood, which is exactly why it is still the right target.

Converting a batch in your browser

Open HEIC to JPG and the whole job is four steps. Nothing is uploaded - the decoder is a build of libheif compiled to WebAssembly that runs inside your own browser tab, so the photos never leave your device.

Drop in your photos. Select as many as you like at once; a full camera roll export is fine, and each file gets a Remove button in case something slipped in.
Choose the output format. JPG is the default and the right answer nearly always.
Set the quality if you want to. It starts at 92%, which is visually indistinguishable from the original for photographs; drop it to around 80% if you need smaller files for email.
Press Convert. Each photo appears as it finishes with a thumbnail, its upright dimensions and its before-and-after size, with a Download button each and a Download all for the batch.

The first conversion of a session pauses for a moment while the decoder itself downloads - it is a 3 MB file, because the compression code is genuinely that large - and after that your browser caches it and conversions start immediately.

Why the JPG comes out bigger

This is the most common surprise, and it is not a bug: it is precisely the efficiency you were being sold, being handed back.

Take a real 3840 x 2160 photograph - 8.29 megapixels, which is in the same range as an iPhone's 12 MP main camera. Stored raw, with no compression at all, those pixels would be 23.7 MB. Saved as HEIC by Apple's own encoder it comes to 783 KB, or about 0.77 bits per pixel. Re-encode the identical decoded image as a JPEG at quality 90 and it is 1.77 MB - 1.79 bits per pixel, and 2.3 times the size of the HEIC. At quality 80 the JPEG is 1.37 MB, still 1.8 times the HEIC. Saved as a lossless PNG it is 9.83 MB, nearly thirteen times the HEIC.

So a 2 MB HEIC turning into a 4 MB JPG is normal and expected. If the result needs to be smaller, there are two honest levers: pull the quality slider down, which costs a little detail, or run the JPG through Compress Image to Size afterwards when there is a specific limit like 500 KB to hit. What you cannot do is get JPEG to match HEIC's size at the same quality - no setting does that, because the format is simply older.

JPG, PNG or WebP

JPG unless you have a specific reason otherwise. PNG is lossless, so it will not degrade the image any further, but as the numbers above show it produces enormous files for photographs - it is built for screenshots, logos and line art, not camera output. WebP is the interesting middle: roughly JPEG-quality compression at noticeably smaller sizes, supported by every current browser, but still refused by a lot of desktop software and upload forms. Pick it for the web, not for a form.

Rotation, and why some converters get it wrong

A HEIC does not necessarily store its pixels the right way up. Like a JPEG with an EXIF orientation tag, it can record the rotation as a flag in the container and leave the image data as the sensor read it - so a portrait photo may physically be a landscape image with a note attached saying "turn this ninety degrees".

A converter that reads the pixels and ignores the flag hands back a sideways photo, which is why some free converters have a reputation for it. The decoder used here applies the rotation while decoding, so portrait shots arrive as portrait JPGs - and the dimensions shown next to each result are the upright ones, which is a quick way to confirm it worked before you download.

What happens to the metadata

Converting through a canvas rewrites the picture from decoded pixels, and nothing else in the original file travels with it. The JPG you get carries no EXIF at all: no GPS coordinates, no camera model or serial number, no timestamp.

For most people that is a quiet benefit - the location tag on a photo taken at home is the single most sensitive thing in a camera roll. If you were relying on the capture date for sorting, note it before converting. And if you want to see what a photo you already have is carrying, or strip a JPG you did not convert, the EXIF viewer and remover reads and cleans files in place.

When you are ready, convert your HEIC photos here - free, no account, no upload.

Frequently asked questions

How do I convert HEIC to JPG on Windows for free?: The simplest route needs no installation at all: open a converter that runs in the browser, such as this one, drop the files in and download the JPGs. Because the decoding happens inside the browser tab, it works the same on a locked-down work machine as on your own, and the photos are never uploaded. The alternative is buying Microsoft's HEVC Video Extensions from the Store, which teaches Windows itself to open HEIC files - useful if you deal with them constantly, but it only makes them viewable, and any form that wants a JPG will still want a JPG.
Does converting HEIC to JPG lose quality?: Technically yes, in the way any lossy re-encode does, but at a sensible quality setting it is not something you can see. The HEIC is decoded to exact pixels first, so nothing is lost in that step; the loss is in the JPEG encode that follows, and at the default 92% quality the difference from the original is invisible on a photograph even side by side. It only becomes visible if you push the quality slider low, or convert the same file back and forth repeatedly. If you genuinely need zero further loss - for archiving or editing - choose PNG instead and accept a file several times larger.
How do I stop my iPhone saving photos as HEIC?: Settings, then Camera, then Formats, and choose Most Compatible instead of High Efficiency. New photos will be saved as JPG from then on, at roughly double the storage cost, and existing HEICs on the phone stay as they are. There is also a middle option worth knowing about: leave the camera on High Efficiency and instead go to Settings, Photos, and under Transfer to Mac or PC choose Automatic, which converts photos to JPG as they are copied off the phone. That keeps the storage saving on the device and hands compatible files to everything else.