What is a HEIC file?

The short answer

HEIC is a photo file. It holds the same kind of picture a JPG holds — your dog, a receipt, a screenshot of a concert ticket — but it stores it using a newer, more efficient compression method. Apple documents the switch as arriving with iOS 11 in 2017, on an iPhone 7 or newer, which is where the chip can encode it. Anything older kept shooting JPG, which is why a very old iPhone in the family never caused anyone this particular trouble.

You will see two names for essentially the same thing. HEIF (High Efficiency Image File Format) is the container standard. HEIC is what Apple calls a HEIF file whose picture data is compressed with HEVC, also known as H.265 — the same compression family used for 4K video. In everyday use, if the extension is .heic, you have an Apple photo.

Why Apple switched to it

Size. In Apple’s own framing, HEIC gets you roughly the same picture quality as JPG at about half the file size. Recent iPhones save a 24-megapixel photo every time you tap the shutter, and can be told to shoot 48, so halving the file size is the difference between running out of storage in a year and running out in two.

The format also does a few things JPG structurally cannot:

• More than one image per file. A Live Photo, a burst, or an HDR shot can live inside a single HEIC container with a designated primary image. This is exactly why a badly written converter sometimes hands you the wrong frame.
• More than 8 bits per colour channel. JPG tops out at 8 bits, which is where banding in a smooth sky comes from. HEIC can carry 10-bit colour.
• Real transparency. JPG has none at all.
• Depth and edit data. Portrait mode blur is stored alongside the picture rather than baked into it.

HEIC vs JPG: which should you keep?

JPG is over thirty years old — the standard dates to 1992 — and every device, browser, printer, and website on earth reads it. HEIC is better technology with far narrower support. That trade sits at the centre of every frustration people have with the format.

• Storage and quality: HEIC wins clearly. Smaller files, better colour depth, transparency, and multiple images per file.
• Compatibility: JPG wins just as clearly. A current Mac, a recent Windows 11 and a modern Android all open a HEIC — I checked each one — but older systems, individual apps and upload forms are each free to refuse it. JPG is the format you never have to think about.
• Editing: HEIC is a delivery format, not a working format. If you edit seriously, you are working from RAW or a TIFF anyway.

The practical answer for most people: keep shooting HEIC so your phone stays roomy, and convert to JPG at the moment you need to send something to someone else. That is what the HEIC to JPG converter on this site is for. If you need transparency preserved or a lossless copy, use HEIC to PNG instead. If you are submitting a document, several photos bundled into one PDF is usually what the form on the other end wants. And when the problem is not the format but the weight — a form that will not take more than 2 MB, a mailbox that bounces the attachment — compressing to a size you name is the tool for that, and it works on JPG, PNG and WebP as well as HEIC.

How to make your iPhone shoot JPEG instead

If you would rather never deal with this again, you can tell the camera to save the old format. It takes about ten seconds:

1. Open Settings.
2. Tap Camera.
3. Tap Formats.
4. Choose Most Compatible instead of High Efficiency.

From then on, new photos are saved as JPG. Two things worth knowing before you do it. Photos you have already taken stay HEIC — this setting is not retroactive, so an existing library still needs converting. And your photos will take up roughly twice the space from that day forward. Some people flip the setting only for a trip where they know they will be sharing constantly, then flip it back.

There is also a related setting under Settings → Photos → Transfer to Mac or PC — on iOS 18 and later, app settings sit together, so the path is Settings → Apps → Photos. Set it to Automatic and your iPhone converts photos to JPG as it copies them over a cable. Set it to Keep Originals and you get the untouched HEIC files.

What to do when someone sends you one

Try opening it first — a good deal of software reads HEIC now, and on some systems it simply works. When it does not, you do not need to install a codec: opening a HEIC file covers what I measured on Windows, Android and iPhone, and the route that works on all of them.

If you only want to look at the thing rather than convert it, the HEIC viewer opens it in this browser tab. And if what you actually care about is the date, the camera or the place travelling with the photo, what your photo carries says exactly which fields survive.