Home/Blog/013
013 · How-to · May 2026

iPhone photos
to JPG.

~4 minute read Three ways to get a normal JPG out of an iPhone, ranked by how much you'll regret each.

You AirDropped a photo from your phone to a Windows laptop and double-clicked it. Nothing happened. You emailed one to your mom and she texted back asking what kind of file that was. You tried to upload one to an old portal and it rejected the extension. Welcome to HEIC.

Since iOS 11, iPhones save photos in HEIC (High Efficiency Image Container) by default. It's a smart format — about half the file size of JPG at equivalent quality, with better support for things like depth maps and bursts. The catch is that "default" only means default on Apple devices. Everywhere else the format is a footnote: Windows needs an extension, older versions of Photoshop don't open it, half the photo printers at CVS still can't read it, and most web forms don't take it.

The short version: there are three ways out.

  1. Change the iPhone's setting so future photos save as JPG.
  2. Let iOS auto-convert at share time — sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't.
  3. Convert existing HEICs in the browser with our HEIC to JPG tool — works on any device, any OS, batch up to five.

Method 1: Change the iPhone's setting (future photos only)

If you'd rather stop fighting HEIC entirely, flip the setting once and your camera roll fills with JPGs from now on.

Open Settings → Camera → Formats. Pick Most Compatible. That's it. Every photo you take after that is JPG; videos become H.264 MP4 instead of HEVC. You lose roughly half your storage efficiency — a 2 MB HEIC becomes a 4 MB JPG — but you also lose the ongoing tax of fighting the format.

This doesn't fix anything already in your camera roll. The 4,000 HEICs sitting there from the last two years are still HEIC. For those, skip to method 3.

Method 2: AirDrop and the share sheet (sometimes converts)

iOS will sometimes convert HEIC to JPG silently when you share. Sometimes. The rules:

The pattern: Apple's own destinations expect HEIC, the rest get JPG if Apple feels like it. That's not a workflow you can rely on for anything that matters. If you need to know it's a JPG before you send it, convert it yourself first.

Method 3: Drop it on Formatly (works everywhere)

This is the route that works regardless of device, regardless of destination, regardless of how iOS is feeling.

  1. Open formatly.app/convert/heic-to-jpg in any browser — including mobile Safari or Chrome on the phone itself.
  2. Drag the .heic file in, or tap the box and pick it from your photo library.
  3. Hit Convert. A .jpg appears under the box, sized for download.

You can drop up to five HEICs at once for batch conversion. Output stays available for an hour, then deletes from our servers automatically. No account, no install.

The mobile-Safari route is the underrated one. Plenty of people don't realize the iPhone can run our converter on the photo before it ever leaves the phone — pick the HEIC from your camera roll, convert, save the JPG back to the camera roll, share that. The whole loop is under a minute.

What about quality?

HEIC is more efficient than JPG at the same quality, not better in some intrinsic way. Converting upsizes the file by roughly 2× (the same pixels, packed less cleverly), but it doesn't add quality. It's a lateral move on visual fidelity and a step backward on file size — and that's a trade worth making to get a file the rest of the world can open.

What you don't want to do is convert from a heavily-compressed JPG back to HEIC and back to JPG, repeatedly. Each lossy round-trip shaves off a little more detail. If you have the original HEIC, convert directly from that.

What about Live Photos, depth maps, Portrait mode?

HEIC can carry extra channels — depth maps for Portrait blur, motion frames for Live Photos, multi-frame burst data. When you convert to JPG, all of that gets stripped. The Live Photo becomes a single still frame. The depth map disappears (so the blur is baked in at whatever level it was rendered, not re-editable). Burst frames flatten to whatever frame was selected as the "key" image.

For 95% of uses — sharing, emailing, uploading, printing — that's exactly what you want. Nobody's web form needs a depth map. If you're specifically trying to preserve a Live Photo or re-edit a Portrait shot, AirDrop to a Mac and keep it HEIC.

When PNG is the right answer instead

If the "photo" is actually a screenshot the phone made (volume + power button), it's already PNG, not HEIC. No conversion needed. If you need transparency — which is rare for camera photos but common for logos or app icons that ended up in your camera roll — go to PNG instead of JPG. We have a HEIC to PNG converter for that.

The everyday rule: photo of a thing → JPG. Screenshot or graphic with sharp edges → PNG. JPG's compression smears the edges of text, which PNG doesn't.

When PDF is the right answer instead

Specific case: you photographed a paper document — a receipt, a passport page, a school permission slip — and you need to send it as "a document," not "an image." Convert it to PDF instead. HEIC to PDF packages the photo as a single-page PDF that opens with the right icon, attaches like a document, and prints to the right page size.

It's the same pixels either way; the difference is what the receiver sees in their inbox.

Why this is even a problem

Apple ships HEIC because it really is smaller and richer than JPG. They also ship a Photos app that quietly converts on the way out when it can. The friction comes from the third-party gap: every other piece of software in the world was built before HEIC existed, and adding support has been slow because the format is patent-encumbered. Microsoft charges for the Windows codec. Older versions of Android, Photoshop, Lightroom, and every "upload your photo here" web form on the internet don't have it.

Until that catches up, converting to JPG before sending is the safest default for anything leaving the Apple ecosystem.

Related