Convert HEIC to JPG

What a HEIC file actually is

HEIC is the format an iPhone uses when "High Efficiency" is switched on in Camera settings. It stores the same photo in roughly half the space of a JPEG by using HEVC — the video codec — to compress a still image. That works beautifully until you email the file to someone on Windows, upload it to a site that was written in 2015, or open it on an Android phone, at which point it is an unopenable blob with a name like IMG_4021.HEIC.

Converting to JPEG trades the file-size advantage for the fact that every piece of software written in the last thirty years can read it. For a photo you are sending to somebody else, that is almost always the right trade.

When to convert, and when not to

Convert to JPG when the photo is leaving your phone: an email attachment, a printing service, a job application, an insurance claim, or any upload form that rejects the file.

Things that catch people out

• A HEIC file from an iPhone can contain more than one image. Live Photos hold a still and a short video, and burst shots hold the whole burst. BriskFile converts the primary image — the one you see in Photos — and leaves the rest.
• The rotation is stored as a flag rather than baked into the pixels. Converters that ignore it produce sideways photos, which is the single most common complaint about HEIC conversion. BriskFile applies the rotation before encoding, so portrait photos come out portrait.
• JPEG has no transparency and no depth map. A portrait-mode HEIC carries depth information used for the blur effect; that data does not survive, though the blur already baked into the image does.
• The converted JPEG will be larger than the HEIC, often by 1.5 to 2 times. That is the cost of compatibility, not a fault in the conversion.

Why this one does not upload your photos

Almost every HEIC converter you will find sends your photo to a server, converts it there, and sends it back. That means your holiday pictures, your children, and your documents sit on somebody else's disk for as long as their retention policy says — and you have no way to check what that policy is.

BriskFile decodes HEIC in your browser instead. On Safari the browser can already do it natively. Everywhere else, a WebAssembly build of libheif runs in a background thread on your own machine. It is more work to build, which is exactly why most converters do not bother, and it is the reason there is no upload progress bar on this page: there is nothing to upload.

You do not have to take that on trust. Open your browser's developer tools, switch to the Network tab, and convert a photo. You will see the page and the codec load, and then nothing at all.