Explainer · 6 min read
HEIC is the photo format your iPhone uses by default. It's clever, compact and quietly annoying the moment a photo leaves Apple's world. Here's what's actually inside one.
Updated
If you just need the photo to open somewhere, you don't need to understand any of this. Drop it into the converter on this page and you'll get a normal JPG in a second or two. It runs in your browser, so nothing is uploaded. Then come back and read the rest if you're curious why HEIC exists at all.
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HEIC (High Efficiency Image Container) is a file format for photos. It's a specific flavour of HEIF, the High Efficiency Image File Format, a standard published by MPEG (the group behind MP4 video). A HEIC file is a HEIF container holding images compressed with HEVC, also known as H.265, the same codec used for 4K video. Apple made it the default camera format with iOS 11 in 2017, which is why most HEIC files in the wild came from an iPhone or iPad.
JPG dates from the early 1990s. Its compression splits a photo into 8×8 pixel blocks and throws away detail your eye is unlikely to miss. It works, but it's crude by modern standards.
HEVC was designed decades later for video, where every byte matters. Applied to a single frame, it brings a few big improvements:
The result is that a HEIC is typically about half the size of a JPG of similar visual quality. On a phone holding thousands of photos, that's a lot of storage.
A JPG is basically one picture plus some metadata. A HEIC is more like a small archive. HEIF was designed to hold many items and describe how they relate, and Apple uses that freedom.
A 12 MP iPhone photo is not stored as one big image. It's split into a grid of tiles (on iPhones, typically 512×512 pixels each) that are compressed separately and reassembled when you open the file. This makes encoding and decoding faster. It's also why some basic HEIC readers produce a weird mosaic or only show one tile: they don't understand the grid.
There's usually a small preview image stored alongside the full photo, so galleries can show a thumbnail without decoding the whole thing.
Portrait mode photos can carry a depth map, a greyscale image describing how far away each part of the scene is. That's what lets you change the background blur after taking the shot. Newer iPhones may also store extra data used for HDR display. A plain JPG has nowhere standard to put any of this, so it's dropped when you convert.
JPG is limited to 8 bits per colour channel, which means 256 levels each of red, green and blue. HEIF can hold 10-bit images or more, giving 1,024 levels per channel and smoother gradients in skies and shadows. Many dedicated cameras that shoot HEIF use 10-bit; how much of that ends up in a phone photo depends on the device and settings.
A Live Photo is a HEIC still plus a short video clip. On iPhone, the motion part is stored as a separate MOV file that's linked to the photo, not baked into the HEIC itself. That's why converting the HEIC gives you only the still image, and why sharing a Live Photo to a non-Apple device usually delivers just the picture.
Like JPG, HEIC stores EXIF data: the date and time, camera and lens, exposure settings and often your GPS location. You can inspect all of it with the HEIC metadata viewer. If you're about to share photos publicly, it's worth knowing the location is in there.
iPhone photos are captured in Display P3, a wider colour space than the sRGB most of the web was built on. Reds and greens can be more saturated. If a converter ignores the embedded colour profile, the result looks a little dull. Our converter keeps the profile in the JPG, and offers an sRGB option for old software that ignores profiles.
What's good about HEIC
What's annoying about HEIC
Support changes with every update, so treat this as a rough guide rather than a guarantee:
| Where | Opens HEIC? |
|---|---|
| iPhone and iPad (iOS 11+) | Yes, natively |
| Mac (macOS High Sierra 10.13+) | Yes, in Preview, Photos and Quick Look |
| Windows 10 and 11 | Usually only after installing Microsoft's HEIF and HEVC extensions |
| Android | Many phones on Android 10 or later, depending on phone and app |
| Google Photos | Generally yes |
| Web browsers | Mostly no; Safari has the best support |
| Website upload forms | Often rejected |
| Print kiosks and photo labs | Often not accepted |
| Older photo editors | Varies; many need JPG or PNG |
For a detailed side-by-side, see HEIC vs JPG. If the terms HEIC and HEIF are muddling you, HEIC vs HEIF sorts that out.
For storing photos on an Apple device, HEIC is the sensible choice. It saves space and loses nothing. The friction only appears when a photo needs to travel somewhere that doesn't speak HEIC.
That leaves you two reasonable strategies:
Most people are best served by option one. HEIC is a good format with a compatibility problem, and the compatibility problem is easy to fix one photo at a time.
FAQ
HEIC stands for High Efficiency Image Container. Strictly, it's a HEIF file whose images are compressed with HEVC, which is why the two names get mixed up so often.
At the same file size, yes. HEIC keeps more detail and shows fewer blocky artefacts than JPG, and it can store more than 8 bits per colour channel. At very high quality settings the visible difference is small; the main win is the smaller file.
No. Renaming changes the label, not the data inside. Most apps will refuse to open the renamed file or show an error. You need to actually decode and re-encode it, which is what a converter does.
Almost. HEIF is the container format and HEIC is a HEIF file that uses HEVC compression. Every HEIC is a HEIF, but not every HEIF is a HEIC.
HEIC relies on HEVC, a patented codec, so Windows doesn't include full support out of the box. You usually need Microsoft's HEIF Image Extensions plus HEVC Video Extensions from the Microsoft Store, or you can convert the photos to JPG.
A little, since JPG compresses less efficiently, but at a quality around 85 to 90 the difference is invisible in normal viewing. Expect the JPG to be larger than the original HEIC.
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