HEIC to JPG on iPhone free, no app needed

Need a JPG from an iPhone photo, without installing an app?

You can do it straight from Safari, and you can also stop your camera from making HEIC in the first place. Both take under a minute, for a single photo or a whole camera roll.

Every converter here is free, full size, no account. Photos convert in your browser and never leave it, except camera RAW files and SVG tracing. Those, like video, audio and e-books, need our server, and we delete them right after.

Everything happens inside this browser tab: the files never leave your device. Need another target format or a quality slider? Open the full converter.

Convert existing HEIC photos (no app needed)

1. Open convert.shinobitools.com in Safari or Chrome on your iPhone.
2. Tap the drop area and choose "Photo Library", then select the HEIC photos you want.
3. Each photo is converted to JPG right on your phone. Nothing is uploaded, and converting one HEIC file to JPG takes about a second; each HEIC to JPG convert leaves the original untouched.
4. Tap "Save" on a photo (or "Download all"). The JPG lands in the Downloads folder of the Files app; from there, Share and Save Image puts it in Photos.

That's how to convert HEIC to JPG on iPhone, on any model: the steps don't depend on which iPhone took the photo. There's nothing to install from the App Store, since Safari itself does the converting.

Make your iPhone shoot JPG from now on

If you would rather never deal with HEIC again, switch the camera format:

1. Open Settings.
2. Tap Camera, then Formats.
3. Choose Most Compatible.

From then on new photos are captured as JPG. Your existing HEIC photos stay as they are, so use the converter for those.

That's how to change HEIC to JPG on iPhone permanently, rather than converting one photo at a time. It changes what the camera captures from now on, not what's already on the phone.

Converting a whole batch at once

You rarely need just one photo. When you tap the drop area and choose "Photo Library", select as many HEIC shots as you like: the converter turns each one into its own JPG in a single pass rather than making you repeat the process. In the full converter, the quality slider applies to the whole batch, so you set it once: the default keeps files reasonably small, and 100% keeps every last bit of detail at the cost of a larger file. Since everything runs on your phone, a big batch just uses your device's memory, with nothing queued on a server. To batch convert HEIC to JPG for a whole album, select all the photos at once. Bulk convert HEIC to JPG works exactly like a single photo, and turning iPhone photos HEIC to JPG in bulk takes no extra steps.

Related: What is a HEIC file?.

Saving to Photos or to Files

Once a photo is converted you have two natural homes for it on iOS. Saving to Photos puts the JPG straight back in your camera roll next to the original: handy when you'll share it from the Photos app. Saving to Files keeps it as a loose document you can attach to an email or upload to a form. Your original HEIC is never overwritten either way, so you always keep the smaller, higher-efficiency version as well.

Doesn't AirDrop or Mail already convert it?

Sometimes, and it's worth knowing when. When you share to a non-Apple destination, iOS occasionally hands over a JPG automatically: for example emailing certain photos. But it is inconsistent: AirDrop between Apple devices keeps the HEIC, and plenty of share paths pass the original .heic straight through, which is exactly how people end up with files a PC won't open. Converting deliberately means you know you're getting a JPG rather than hoping iOS chose to make one.

Not just iPhone

Although HEIC is an iPhone habit, the converter itself is just a web page, so it works the same in a browser on Android, Windows or a Mac. If someone sends you a HEIC and you're on a laptop, you can open the converter there and get a JPG without installing an Apple codec.

It's a free HEIC converter that runs in any browser, and as an online HEIC converter it never uploads a photo: it's an online converter only in the sense that it's a web page, so the HEIC files stay on your device. Each HEIC image is decoded locally, so converting a HEIC image to JPG leaves the original HEIC photo untouched. As a HEIC image converter and HEIC file converter, it treats one photo and a whole album the same way. It's a picture converter as well: to convert picture to JPG from a screenshot or a downloaded WEBP, the same box works, any photo to JPG, any image to JPG. That makes it a general photo converter to JPG, and the JPGs look the same as the originals at normal size.

If the file is in Google Drive or iCloud Drive rather than the Photos app, save it to your device first: the converter reads local files, not cloud folders.

A note on quality and size

Switching to "Most Compatible" means slightly larger files, because JPG is less efficient than HEIC. For most people the extra space is a fair trade for photos that open everywhere. When converting in the full converter, the quality slider lets you decide the balance yourself.

What the JPG keeps, and what stays behind in the HEIC

A conversion is not a copy. The picture comes across; several things that were bundled with the picture do not, because the file is decoded and re-encoded from scratch:

• All metadata is dropped. No GPS coordinates, no camera model, no lens or exposure data, no capture date. That's a real privacy win if you're about to post the photo or send it to a stranger: the location where you took it isn't in the file any more. It's also a real loss if you care about ordering: photo apps fall back to the file's creation date, so a converted holiday album can end up sorted by the day you converted it rather than the day you shot it.
• A Live Photo becomes a single still. The motion and sound live in a separate video alongside the HEIC, and a JPG has nowhere to put them.
• The depth map goes. Portrait-mode photos carry a depth channel that lets you re-edit the background blur afterwards. The blur that's already applied stays visible in the JPG; the ability to change it doesn't survive.
• HDR brightness information is flattened. An iPhone HDR photo carries extra data telling a bright screen how far above white to push the highlights. JPG has no room for it, so the converted file looks very slightly flatter on an HDR display, and identical everywhere else.
• Edits are baked in. Crops, filters and adjustments become permanent pixels. You lose the ability to revert to the original, which is exactly why the next section matters.

Convert the copy, keep the original

The sensible workflow is to treat the JPG as a delivery format rather than a replacement:

• HEIC is roughly half the size at comparable quality. That's the entire reason your iPhone shoots it. Converting your whole library to JPG to "make it compatible" trades away storage and the extras above, in return for compatibility you only actually need at the moment you send a file somewhere.
• Convert when something refuses the file, an upload form, an older Windows machine, a print shop, a council or insurance portal, a piece of software that hasn't been updated in years. Then convert that one photo, or those ten, and leave the rest alone.
• Keep the HEIC as your archive. If you ever want the Live Photo motion, the depth map or an unedited version back, the original is the only place it exists.
• Switching your camera to JPG is a separate decision. It saves you converting later, and it doubles what every photo costs in storage from that day on. On a 64 GB phone that adds up fast.

One practical note on quality: the full converter's slider defaults to 90% (the box on this page uses 92%), which for a photograph is visually hard to tell apart from the original at any normal viewing size. Push it to 100 only if the file is going to be edited further or printed large: the file grows considerably for a difference you'd struggle to see on screen.

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By Sam Ridder, I build and run ConvertNinja on my own hardware, on my own. Who I am.