Your iPhone photos arrived as HEIC — and Windows won't open them

2026-09-05

You AirDrop or copy photos off an iPhone, double-click one on a Windows PC — and the viewer refuses. The files end in .heic, the upload form you actually needed them for rejects them too, and the photos are somehow both fine and useless.

What HEIC is and why Apple uses it

HEIC is the format iPhones shoot in by default. It stores the same photo in roughly half the space of a JPG, which is why Apple switched — camera rolls are enormous. Inside Apple's ecosystem you never notice, because everything there reads it natively.

Outside that ecosystem, support is patchy. Windows often needs a codec installed before a preview appears, older editing software may never support it, and upload forms with a fixed JPG/PNG whitelist reject it without looking inside the file.

Converting without handing your photos to a server

Most HEIC converters online are upload-based: your photos travel to their server, get converted there, and come back. For family photos or anything personal, that is a real cost.

Our HEIC to JPG converter works differently: your browser downloads a small decoder — code, not your file — and the photos are decoded and re-encoded on your own machine. Nothing is uploaded, which you can verify by watching the network tab while it converts. A whole batch works in one go.

One honest detail: a burst-mode HEIC can contain several shots in one file. We convert the first one. If you need every frame of a burst, export them separately on the phone first.

Stopping the problem at the source

If you keep sending photos to Windows machines or upload forms, you can make the iPhone shoot JPG from the start: Settings → Camera → Formats → Most Compatible. New photos save as JPG; the HEICs you already have are what the converter is for. The trade-off is that JPGs take more storage on the phone — that is the same size advantage running in reverse.

What we deliberately don't do

We don't guess an output format for you. JPG is pre-selected on that page because it is what upload forms usually want, but if your photo needs a transparent background or lossless edits later, pick PNG in the same screen instead.

The short version

• HEIC is Apple's space-saving default; much software outside Apple still refuses it.
• Converting to JPG fixes it everywhere; it can be done in your browser with nothing uploaded.
• Burst HEICs convert as their first shot.
• Camera → Formats → Most Compatible makes future photos JPG from the start.