A rental listing lives or dies on its photos. A bright living room, a clean kitchen, a bathroom that actually looks like the one in the ad — that is what gets a viewing booked. What landlords do not expect is a file-format problem standing between their iPhone and the listing site. But iPhone photos are HEIC by default, and plenty of rental platforms, property managers' inboxes, and older browsers still cannot preview them.
The result is familiar: the upload looks fine on your phone, then shows as a broken image or a file the site refuses on the listing. Prospective tenants see a listing with missing photos and move on. The fix takes a minute, if you do it in the right order.
Keep the HEIC originals
Do not delete or overwrite the originals. Convert copies for the listing and keep the masters — if you re-list the property later, or a tenant asks for a print-quality photo, you will want the full-quality originals again.Do not just rename the file
Changing photo.heic to photo.jpg changes the name, not the contents. The listing site will still see HEIC data, and the failure becomes harder to explain to a property manager over the phone.Convert copies to JPG before uploading
If you need JPGs quickly, you can convert HEIC to JPG for rental listings entirely in your browser: the conversion happens on your own device, nothing is uploaded to a server, and no account is needed. Convert the photos that actually sell the place, then open each JPG yourself before you upload it.Upload a useful set, not a camera roll dump
One wide shot per room for context, then close-ups of the features tenants care about — storage, light, the kitchen counter, the bathroom fixtures. A listing with ten clear JPGs books viewings faster than one with forty unsorted files, and JPGs make those photos readable on any device a tenant uses.
Disclosure: I'm the developer of FileOnTap. The "keep the original, convert a copy, check it opens" order is the real takeaway whichever tool you use.
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