Short version: all four common ways to turn an iPhone HEIC photo into a JPG "work", but they disagree on three things people only notice later. A portrait photo can come out with sideways pixels, the camera metadata may or may not survive, and the JPG can end up bigger than the HEIC you started with. On my test file a default browser conversion grew from 745.1 KB to 1.01 MB, a 38% increase.
If HEIC is new to you: it is the format iPhones save photos in by default (the camera setting calls it "High Efficiency"). The files are small, but plenty of places reject them. Windows needs both the "HEIF Image Extensions" and the "HEVC Video Extensions" to open them, and the HEVC one may cost money in the Store.
The sample
I did not use my own phone photo. The source is a CC0 photo from Wikimedia Commons, shot on an iPhone 6 (an airport apron in Madrid, 2015, 3264×2448). I encoded it to HEIC with the macOS system encoder and set the orientation to portrait, which gave a 745.1 KB file. That makes it a HEIC produced on a Mac, not one straight out of an iPhone, so anything about HDR or Live Photos is outside what I can say here.
The comparison table
| Method | Where | Portrait orientation | EXIF | How many at once | Evidence |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Camera format "Most Compatible" | iPhone Settings › Camera › Formats | n/a, new photos are JPEG | n/a | no conversion | Apple docs |
| Transfer to Mac or PC: "Automatic" | iPhone Settings › Photos | not tested | not tested | per import | Apple docs |
sips |
macOS Terminal | pixels stay landscape, EXIF Orientation 6 | kept | many (tested 2) | my test |
| Browser, local decode (ImgIng) | browser tab (tested in Chromium) | pixels rotated upright, Orientation 1 | EXIF and XMP kept | one | my test |
Row by row
Most Compatible. Apple's support page says that after switching Settings › Camera › Formats to "Most Compatible", new photos are saved as JPEG (and videos as H.264). Photos you already took stay HEIC. New photos will also take more space. I did not shoot comparison photos for this one.
Transfer to Mac or PC. On newer iOS versions the setting lives under Settings › Apps › Photos. Apple says HEIF/HEVC media may be converted to JPEG/H.264 when you import to a computer, and "Keep Originals" turns that off. That "may" is doing a lot of work. I had no way to test when it converts or what the orientation and metadata look like afterwards, so treat it as something to try, not a guarantee.
sips on macOS. The one-liner is sips -s format jpeg *.heic --out out/, and it happily converts a whole folder (I ran two files in one go). The catch shows up with portrait photos. The output JPG is still 3264×2448 landscape pixels with EXIF Orientation = 6, which means "rotate 90° clockwise when displaying". Preview on a Mac honors that, so everything looks fine locally. Anything that ignores the tag may show the photo lying on its side. Camera metadata such as the model "iPhone 6" is preserved.
Browser, local decode. I used ImgIng. After you drop in a HEIC it tells you the browser cannot decode it natively and offers a "load decoder" button. That downloads a decoder component. The photo itself is not uploaded; I watched the network log and there were zero POST requests. The output JPG is 2448×3264 with Orientation = 1, so the pixels themselves are upright, and EXIF and XMP are kept. Two things you have to do by hand: WebP is pre-selected after upload, so you need to click JPG, and the file picker takes one image at a time. (Converting to HEIC in that tool is marked as server-side; I only converted from HEIC.)
The size surprise
The default JPG quality was 88, because the tool classified this airport photo as "Graphics / text". I still don't know why it didn't pick the Photo preset (80). Results on the portrait sample:
| Output | Quality | Size | vs. HEIC |
|---|---|---|---|
| JPG | 88 (default) | 1.01 MB | +38% |
| JPG | 80 | 742.2 KB | about the same |
| WebP | 84 (default) | 423.2 KB | −43% |
| PNG | lossless | 8.64 MB | about 11.9× |
An upscaled 4032×3024 version of the same photo went +61% at quality 88 and still +17% at 80. HEIC simply compresses better than JPG, so a high quality setting costs bytes, which matters when an upload form has a size limit. I didn't record the sips output size, so it's not in the table.
Which one I'd pick
- You keep sending photos to Windows users: switch the camera to Most Compatible and stop converting.
- A batch of files on a Mac that stays on your machine:
sips, then upload one test image wherever it's going and check it isn't sideways. - One or two photos on someone else's computer, or the destination is a website you don't control: convert in the browser, click JPG, look at the size, and drop quality to 80 (or send WebP if they accept it).
- Importing over a cable anyway: set transfer to Automatic, but check what actually arrives.
The browser tool I tested is at https://imging.ai/.
Top comments (0)