Does converting HEIC to JPG lose quality?

Slightly, in theory — HEIC stores more colour depth than JPG can hold. In practice the difference is invisible for sharing, printing and form uploads. It only matters for heavily edited high-contrast images.

How do I stop my iPhone saving HEIC?

Settings → Camera → Formats → select "Most Compatible". New photos will be JPG. Photos already on the device stay HEIC and still need converting.

Image·18 August 2026·4 min read

Why iPhone Photos Won't Open on Windows (and How to Fix It)

iPhones save photos as HEIC, which Windows and most upload forms can't read. Here's why, how to convert them to JPG, and how to stop it happening again.

You send photos from your iPhone to a Windows laptop and get files ending in .HEIC that will not open. Or you try to upload one to an application form and it is rejected as an invalid format. Nothing is broken — the file is simply in a format the receiving software cannot read.

Why Apple uses a format nothing else supports

HEIC stores an image at roughly the same visual quality as JPG in about half the file size. On a phone holding tens of thousands of photos, that is a serious saving, so Apple made it the camera default in iOS 11.

The catch is licensing. HEIC's underlying compression is patent-encumbered, so Microsoft ships Windows without the codec and sells it as a separate add-on, and a great deal of older software never added support at all. The result is a format that works flawlessly inside Apple's ecosystem and awkwardly everywhere else.

Converting the photos you already have

Convert to JPG. It is universally readable, every upload form accepts it, and the quality difference is not visible in normal use.

Convert HEIC photos to JPGHEIC to JPG — free, no signup

Worth noting: because this runs on your own device rather than uploading to a server, your photos are not sent anywhere. That matters when the photos in question are ID documents or personal — a category that describes most of the HEIC files people need to convert in a hurry.

Stopping it happening again

On the iPhone: Settings → Camera → Formats → "Most Compatible". New photos save as JPG from then on. You lose the storage saving, which for most people is a fair trade against never dealing with this again.

There is also a second setting worth checking. Under Settings → Photos, scroll to "Transfer to Mac or PC" and choose "Automatic" — this converts photos to JPG as they transfer. Set to "Keep Originals", it hands over the raw HEIC files and reproduces the problem every time you plug in.

Changing the camera format only affects new photos. Everything already in your library stays HEIC.

Live Photos

A Live Photo is a still image plus a short video. Converting it to JPG keeps the still frame and discards the motion — which is almost always what you want for a form upload or a print, but is worth knowing before you convert a batch and delete the originals.

Frequently asked

HEIC is the container Apple has used for camera photos since iOS 11. It stores roughly the same image quality as JPG in about half the space, which is why Apple adopted it — but support outside Apple's ecosystem is still patchy.

Tools mentioned in this guide

HEIC to JPGiPhone photos to JPG that opens anywhere.Image ConverterConvert between JPG, PNG, WEBP.Image CompressorShrink JPG/PNG file size.JPG to PDFImages into one PDF.

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