If you've ever transferred photos from an iPhone to a Windows PC or tried to attach an iPhone photo to an email, you've likely run into the HEIC problem. The file opens on your iPhone but nothing else knows what to do with it.
Here's how to convert HEIC to JPG in seconds — for free, without installing anything, and without sending your photos to a third-party server.
HEIC (High Efficiency Image Container) is Apple's default photo format since iOS 11. It uses the HEIF standard with HEVC compression, which delivers roughly half the file size of JPEG at the same perceived quality.
Apple switched to HEIC to save storage on devices. The problem is compatibility: HEIC is not natively supported on Windows (without a paid codec), older Android devices, most web browsers, or the majority of online services.
So while HEIC is great for your camera roll, it's a headache the moment you need to share, print, or upload those photos anywhere.
That's it. No account, no upload to a server, no watermarks. The conversion runs entirely in your browser using WebAssembly.
You can convert multiple HEIC files at once — drop a whole batch from your iPhone transfer and get them all back as JPGs in one go.
Apple does let you change your iPhone camera to shoot in JPEG instead of HEIC. Go to Settings → Camera → Formats → Most Compatible.
This works going forward but doesn't help with the thousands of existing HEIC photos already on your device. And switching to JPEG means each new photo takes up roughly twice as much storage.
The better workflow: keep HEIC on your iPhone, convert to JPG only when you need to share or use a photo outside Apple's ecosystem.
HEIC to JPG conversion involves recompression, which technically introduces some quality loss — but at high quality settings (80+), the difference is invisible to the human eye at normal viewing sizes.
imgshrnk converts at high quality by default, preserving as much detail as the JPEG format allows.
If you need lossless output, PNG is a better target format. PNG files will be larger than JPG but retain every pixel from the original.
HEIC and HEIF are often used interchangeably. Technically, HEIF is the container format standard and HEIC is Apple's specific implementation. imgshrnk's converter handles both .heic and .heif file extensions.
Microsoft sells a HEVC Video Extension in the Windows Store for a small fee, which adds HEIC support to Windows Photo Viewer. But you shouldn't need to pay to open your own photos.
The free alternative: open your HEIC files in any browser using imgshrnk, convert to JPG, and they'll open in every application on Windows without any additional software.
If you've exported a large batch of iPhone photos to your PC and they're all HEIC, you don't need to convert them one by one:
No per-file limits, no session caps. The only limit is your browser's available memory, which is typically enough for hundreds of files.
HEIC photos from your iPhone likely contain personal images — family, home interiors, location data embedded in EXIF. Online converters that upload your files to a server are receiving all of that.
imgshrnk processes HEIC conversion entirely in your browser using WebAssembly. Your files are never transmitted. They load into your browser's memory, get converted, and the result is handed back to you — all locally.