Written by the founder of BreezeConvert — a creative director working across set design, game 3D, Unreal/VFX and AI content pipelines. More about the author.
You send a photo from your iPhone to someone on a Windows PC or an older Android, and it won't open — or it lands as a file called IMG_1234.HEIC that their software just shrugs at. It's one of the most common "why won't this just work" moments in everyday tech, and the reason is a quiet format switch Apple made years ago. Here's what's going on and how to fix it for good.
What HEIC actually is
HEIC is Apple's name for an image stored in the HEIF container using HEVC (H.265) compression. Since iOS 11, iPhones save photos in this format by default because it's genuinely better than JPG: it produces roughly half the file size at the same quality, supports higher colour depth, and can hold extras like Live Photos and depth data in a single file. On your iPhone it's a clear win — you fit twice as many photos in the same storage with no visible loss.
So why can't other people open it?
The trouble starts the moment the photo leaves Apple's world. HEIC is efficient but not widely supported outside recent Apple devices — plenty of Windows apps, older Android phones, web upload forms, and design tools still can't read it. So a format that's perfect for storage becomes a problem for sharing. The universal fallback is still JPG: it's larger, but essentially everything made in the last twenty-five years can open it. When compatibility matters more than file size — which is most of the time you're sending a photo to someone else — JPG is the safe choice.
Option 1: stop your iPhone making HEICs
If you'd rather avoid the conversion step entirely, you can tell your iPhone to shoot JPGs from now on. Go to Settings → Camera → Formats and choose Most Compatible instead of "High Efficiency." From then on the camera saves JPG. There's also a subtler fix: under Settings → Photos, the option "Automatically" transfer to Mac or PC converts photos to JPG when you offload them over a cable. These help going forward, but neither does anything for the HEIC photos already sitting in your library.
Option 2: convert the photos you already have
For existing HEICs — the ones you actually need to send right now — you convert them to JPG. This is where the privacy question matters more than people realise. Photos are personal: faces, homes, kids, documents, locations baked into the metadata. Uploading a batch of them to some free "HEIC to JPG" website means handing all of that to a stranger's server. There's no need. Our image converter turns HEIC into JPG (or PNG, or WebP) entirely in your browser — the photos are decoded and re-saved on your own device, and nothing is transmitted anywhere. You can drop in a whole batch at once, and if you're at all unsure, the verify-it-yourself page shows you how to confirm no upload happens.
Which JPG settings should you keep?
A couple of practical notes once you're converting. First, expect the file to get bigger — that's the trade-off for compatibility, since JPG is less efficient than HEIC; it's normal and fine for sharing. Second, if the destination has a size limit (an email, an upload form), convert to JPG first and then, if needed, run it through the image compressor to bring it down. Third, if you care about location privacy, remember a JPG can still carry the GPS metadata from where the photo was taken; strip it before sharing if that matters to you. For choosing between JPG, PNG and WebP in general, the image formats guide lays out when each one wins.
The short version
HEIC is your iPhone saving space with a modern, efficient format — great on the phone, awkward the moment you share it because so little else reads it. Switch the camera to "Most Compatible" if you want JPGs from now on, and for the photos you already have, convert them to JPG locally so they open everywhere without your images ever leaving your device.