Convert HEIC to JPG

Why your iPhone gives you a file nothing will accept

Since iOS 11, iPhones have saved photos as HEIC by default — High Efficiency Image Container, built on the same compression family as modern video. It is a genuinely better format than JPEG: roughly half the file size for the same visual quality, with support for transparency, depth information and image sequences.

The problem is everything else. Web upload forms, older desktop software, printing services, government portals and a large amount of business software were written when JPEG and PNG were the only options worth handling, and they simply do not recognise a .heic file. So you have a photo your phone considers modern and the form considers unreadable.

Confusingly, this often only becomes visible when you move the file off the phone. Share a photo directly from iOS and it will frequently convert to JPEG on your behalf during the share. Copy the file off with a cable, or attach it from Files, and you get the original HEIC and the rejection that comes with it.

How the conversion works here

Browsers cannot decode HEIC natively — the format is patent-encumbered and no major browser ships a decoder. FileBelow works around this by loading a compiled HEIC decoder, the open-source libheif library built to WebAssembly, and running it in your browser.

That decoder is about 1.4 MB, so it is deliberately not part of the page. It is fetched only at the moment you actually select a HEIC file, which means everyone who is not converting a HEIC never pays for it. Once fetched, your browser caches it for next time.

The photo itself still never leaves your device. The decoder is code coming to the image, not the image going to a server.

What you should know about the trade

Converting to JPEG will make the file bigger, often two to three times bigger, for the same picture. That is not a fault in the conversion — it is the efficiency difference between the two formats, and it is why Apple switched in the first place. If the form you are filling in also has a size limit, set it here at the same time and FileBelow will hit both requirements in one pass rather than making you convert and then compress separately.

HEIC files also carry rotation as metadata, exactly as JPEGs do. FileBelow reads that tag and bakes the rotation into the pixels, so the JPG you get out is the right way up even in software that ignores metadata entirely. Location and camera information is dropped during conversion, which is usually what you want when sending a photo to a stranger.

If the conversion fails

A small number of HEIC files use encodings the decoder does not handle, and Live Photos are containers holding both a still and a short video. If FileBelow cannot open the file, the reliable fallback is to have the phone do the conversion: on iOS, open Settings, then Camera, then Formats, and choose Most Compatible to shoot JPEG from now on. For photos you have already taken, sharing them to Files or emailing them to yourself will usually produce a JPEG copy.