Convert HEIF to JPG

Nothing is wrong with the file. HEIF is ISO/IEC 23008-12, published in 2015, and it stores a photograph better than anything that came before it. The problem is the picture inside, which is compressed with HEVC — and HEVC decoding is covered by patent pools that many vendors declined to pay into. Windows sends you to the Store for a codec, older editors refuse the file outright, and browser support reaches only part of the market.

That is why the search that lands here is almost never "which format is better". It is a claims portal that accepts JPEG and PNG, an accountant who cannot see the receipt, a print shop whose ordering system rejects the upload. The format question was settled by somebody else; what is left is doing the conversion without making the picture worse than it has to be.

JPEG is ITU-T T.81, standardised in 1992, and its browser support is recorded here as complete — as it is for PNG, GIF, BMP and WebP. What separates it from those is everything outside the browser: every phone, every camera, every content system, every printer driver and every ten-year-old copy of anything reads it. No other raster format has that reach.

The cost of that reach is everything JPEG never learned. Eight bits per channel, no alpha channel, no animation, no second image in the file. Those are not deficiencies to work around; they are the shape of a format designed before any of those things were normal, and they are exactly why it is still universal.

Expect the JPG to be about twice the size of the HEIF. HEVC intra-frame coding is a generation ahead of JPEG at the same visible quality, which is the entire reason phones adopted the container in the first place — the same shot in half the storage.

Converting hands that advantage back. If you are converting a folder to email it somewhere, that doubling is the number to plan around, and the maximum-width field is the lever that undoes it: a 4,032-pixel photograph resized to 1,600 pixels wide is a fraction of the bytes and still larger than anything an email will display.

The quality slider runs from 1 to 100 and starts at 82, which is the setting that survives close inspection on a photograph without spending bytes nobody can see. Below about 70 the artefacts start showing up in skies and skin; above 90 the file grows fast and the picture does not improve.

The part worth knowing is that this is a second compression, not the first. The HEIF already threw information away when the camera wrote it, and the JPG throws away more from what is left. One pass is invisible. What is not invisible is doing it repeatedly — converting to JPG, editing, saving again, converting again. Keep the HEIF as the original and treat the JPG as a copy you can regenerate.

HEIF is specified for up to ten bits per channel and for wide colour, which is why a modern phone can record a sunset without the sky separating into visible steps. JPEG is an eight-bit format, so those extra two bits have nowhere to go and the conversion discards them.

On an ordinary photograph you will not see it. Where it shows is a large area of smooth gradient — a clear sky, a studio backdrop, a fade behind a subject — which can pick up faint banding it did not have. There is no setting that prevents this, because the limit is in the target format rather than in the encoder.

A HEIF from a recent phone is frequently tagged with a wide colour space, and this conversion does not carry that tag across. The output holds pixel values and nothing that tells a viewer how to interpret them, so they are read as ordinary sRGB.

For most pictures that is what you wanted anyway, since sRGB is what a browser, an office document and a cheap printer assume. The case where it matters is a deliberately saturated shot: strong reds and greens can land slightly flatter than they looked on the phone. If exact colour is the point, that is an argument for keeping the original and sending it to someone who can read it.

JPEG can hold EXIF, XMP, IPTC, an ICC profile and GPS coordinates — it is one of the richest metadata carriers in common use. The file produced here contains none of it, and not because it was filtered: the conversion decodes the picture to raw pixels and re-encodes from those, and an EXIF block cannot cross that gap.

Treat that as the useful default it is. A phone photograph is frequently stamped with the latitude and longitude of the place it was taken, which is usually somebody's home, and posting it to a forum or a marketplace listing publishes that. If you needed the capture date, read it off the HEIF before converting, because it is not in the JPG.

HEIF can carry an alpha channel and JPEG cannot, so anything transparent has to become something. It becomes the background colour set above the drop zone, which starts at white — the control reached HEIC and HEIF sources in August 2026, having been offered before that only from PNG, WebP and the other formats the site expected to carry alpha.

In practice this almost never arises: what people have in a .heif file is a photograph, and photographs are rectangular and opaque. If you are converting an image with a genuine cut-out — a product shot on a transparent background, an exported graphic — convert it to PNG instead, which keeps the transparency intact rather than asking you to settle it with one colour.

The container is a container, and it is allowed to hold a burst, a set of alternates, or a sequence. The decoder here takes the primary image — the one the phone or the camera shows you when you open the file — and stops there.

That is deliberate. Converting every image in the container would turn one dropped file into a surprise batch of eight, and the picture you meant is the one you saw. If you actually need the rest, that is a job for software that can browse the container rather than for a converter that promises one file in and one file out.

There is no JPG to HEIF page on this site and there is not going to be one. Decoding HEIF is done by libheif, which is LGPL-3.0 and can be shipped honestly by a static site that names it, publishes the licence and keeps it in its own replaceable chunk. Encoding would need an HEVC encoder, and the one everybody uses is GPL, which a site like this one cannot meet the terms of.

So this is a missing feature with a reason rather than an oversight, and it changes what you should do with your files: keep the HEIF originals. A JPG made from them is a copy you can always make again, and the reverse trip does not exist here at any price.

Decoder and encoder both run inside the browser tab, on your own processor. There is no upload step, no queue, no account and no server-side copy to expire — which is also why it works on a computer whose operating system cannot display the HEIF: nothing is asking the operating system.

The free tier takes files up to 100 MB each, and a folder of them converts together with a progress row per file. Once two have finished, an "all as ZIP" button appears, which is the difference between converting forty holiday photographs and clicking forty download buttons.

The two extensions name the same specification, and the difference is recorded eight bytes into the file. Every file of this family opens with a file-type box — its length in the first four bytes, the characters ftyp in the next four — and then a brand: mif1 or msf1 for the generic form that gets the .heif extension, and heic, heix, hevc or hevx for the Apple-flavoured one. That brand is the only thing distinguishing them, and no viewer treats them differently.

This matters because renaming does not help and is not needed. Changing .heif to .heic does not make a stubborn program open the file, and dropping either extension onto this page works identically — the drop zone reads the brand rather than trusting the name. If you have a folder of mixed extensions from mixed devices, convert the lot in one pass.

The failure this whole exercise is meant to prevent is discovering at the deadline that the file is still not accepted. So test the real destination before deleting anything: upload one JPG to the portal, attach one to the email, open one on the machine that could not read the HEIF.

JPEG is the safest bet available, but a specification can also ask for a maximum file size, a minimum resolution or a particular aspect ratio, and none of those is a format question. Converting one file first and putting it through the whole process takes two minutes and tells you which of the remaining thirty-nine settings you need to change.