Using iPhone Photos in a Video or Slideshow

Most video editors either refuse HEIC outright or import it unreliably, so the first step of any photo-based video is converting the stills. What you convert them to, and at what size, decides how the edit behaves for the rest of the project.

This guide covers that first step properly, then the parts nobody warns you about: resolution, colour shifts and import order.

Why editors struggle with HEIC

Video editors do not usually decode images themselves. They ask the operating system, and the operating system may not know how.

HEIC needs an HEVC decoder, which is licensed rather than free, so support arrives unevenly. On a Mac it generally works because macOS ships the decoder. On Windows it depends on whether the HEVC extensions are installed, and even then plenty of editors do not use them for still images.

The symptom is rarely a clean error. You get a file that appears in the browser and then imports as a blank frame, or a media-offline placeholder, or an import that silently skips half the selection.

Converting first removes the entire category of problem, which is why every professional workflow does it whether or not the editor claims support.

Which editors take it and which do not

Support tracks the operating system more than the software, which is why the same editor behaves differently on two machines.

On macOS, HEIC generally imports, because the system ships the decoder. Final Cut Pro and iMovie are the smoothest, and Premiere and Resolve usually manage.

On Windows, it depends on whether the HEVC extensions are installed, and even with them present many editors do not route still images through the system decoder at all. This is where most reports of “it just shows a blank frame” come from.

CapCut, Canva and the web-based editors vary by build and are the least predictable of the lot, because they are decoding in a browser or a sandbox with its own rules.

None of that is worth debugging on a deadline. Converting takes seconds and behaves identically everywhere, which is why it is the standard first step rather than a workaround. If you want the background on why the licensing works this way, what a HEIC file is covers it.

PNG or JPG for an edit

The two sensible answers, and they are not interchangeable.

PNG is lossless. If you are going to grade the footage, push exposure, or scale a photo up during a slow zoom, PNG gives that work clean data. The cost is size — our 12 megapixel test photo came to 13.71 MB as PNG — which on a hundred-photo timeline is real disk and real scrubbing lag.

JPG at high quality is the pragmatic choice for a straightforward slideshow. At quality 85 the same photo was 1.27 MB, it imports and scrubs faster, and nobody watching a 1080p video will see the difference.

The rule of thumb: grading or heavy scaling means PNG, everything else means JPG.

Size the photos for your timeline

This is where most people waste hours of render time.

Your timeline	Convert photos to
1080p	~2560 px on the long edge
4K	~5000 px on the long edge
Vertical social	~2560 px on the short edge

The reason to exceed your timeline rather than match it is movement. A Ken Burns pan or a slow push-in crops into the image, and if the photo is exactly 1920 wide you are enlarging past its real detail the moment you zoom.

Going much bigger than that is waste. A full 4000-pixel frame on a 1080p timeline is four times the pixels the render will ever use, and every one of them slows down playback.

Our HEIC resizer will cap the long edge across a whole batch, and the HEIC compressor will hit a target file size if your editor is choking on the volume rather than the dimensions.

The washed-out photo problem

A photo that looks vivid on the phone and flat in the editor is one of the more confusing things in this workflow.

Modern iPhones store an HDR gain map alongside the image: extra brightness information that Photos applies when displaying it. A video editor generally ignores it, so what you import is the base image without the boost.

Nothing is broken and nothing was lost in the conversion — you are simply seeing the photo without the display-time enhancement. The fix is to grade it in the editor rather than hunting for a conversion setting, because the information the phone was using is not part of what a JPG or PNG can carry.

If you want to see exactly what a file contains before you convert it, our HEIC EXIF viewer reads the metadata locally.

Keeping the order intact

Editors sort by filename on import. Cameras name files sequentially. Those two facts do most of the work if you let them.

Convert the batch and keep the original names — IMG_4821 becomes IMG_4821.jpg, and the sequence survives. Our converter preserves names and hands the whole batch back as one zip, so the order is already right when it lands in your media bin.

What does not survive is the date. Converting rebuilds the image from raw pixels, so the EXIF block goes, and with it the shooting time an editor might otherwise sort by.

If you need a different order — chronological across two cameras, or a hand-picked sequence — rename the files before converting, not after. Numbering them 001, 002 and so on takes a minute and saves a lot of dragging.

The rest of the slideshow

Once the stills are in, the shape of a photo video is fairly standard.

Timing. Three to five seconds a photo is the usual range. Faster reads as a montage, slower needs motion or narration to hold attention.

Movement. A slow push-in or pan stops a still frame from feeling static. This is the reason to have converted at a higher resolution than your timeline.

Music. Anything with a clear structure gives you cut points, which makes the edit feel deliberate rather than arbitrary.

Narration. A voice track carries a photo sequence further than music alone, especially for anything explanatory — a project recap, a property tour, a family history. If you would rather not record yourself, a text-to-speech tool such as AnySpeech turns a written script into a voice track you can drop straight onto the timeline, which also means you can revise the script without re-recording anything.

Write the script first either way. It sets the length, and the length tells you how many photos you need.

Screenshots and graphics on the same timeline

Photo videos usually contain more than photographs — a title card, a screenshot, a diagram, a logo.

Those follow a different rule. They are flat graphics rather than continuous tone, so a lossy format damages exactly the parts that carry meaning: text edges, thin lines, hard boundaries. Keep them as PNG regardless of what you decided for the photographs.

It is worth noting that a screenshot from an iPhone is already a PNG, so no conversion is needed at all — the reasoning is in why screenshots are PNG and photos are HEIC.

If a graphic needs to scale during a zoom, and you have it as real shapes rather than pixels, an SVG scales without limit. Our HEIC to SVG tracer will produce one from an image if the source is flat enough to trace.

A workable order of operations

Putting it together, for a batch of iPhone photos:

Cull first. Converting 400 photos to keep 60 wastes time and disk.
Rename if the shooting order is not the order you want.
Convert to PNG or JPG at a sensible resolution, all in one batch.
Import the whole folder at once, so the editor sorts by name.
Build the timeline, add movement, then narration and music last.

The conversion step is the one that is easy to get wrong in a way you discover an hour later, which is why it is worth doing deliberately rather than letting the editor try.

The bottom line

HEIC is a storage format, not an editing format, and converting HEIC photos for video is the step every real workflow starts with. Every video workflow converts it, and the only question is whether you do that on purpose or after an import goes wrong.

Convert to PNG when you are grading, JPG when you are not, at roughly a third more resolution than your timeline. Keep the filenames so the order survives. And expect the photos to look slightly flatter than they did on the phone, because part of what you were seeing there was never in the file.

Frequently asked questions

Why won't my video editor import HEIC files?

Most editors rely on the operating system's image decoders, and HEIC needs an HEVC decoder that is licensed rather than universal. On Windows in particular an editor will often list the file and then fail to read it, or refuse to show it at all.

Should I convert to PNG or JPG for video editing?

PNG if you are colour grading or scaling heavily, because it is lossless and gives the grade clean data to work on. JPG at high quality is fine for a straightforward slideshow and imports far faster on a long timeline.

What resolution should the photos be?

Match or slightly exceed your timeline. For a 1080p video, 2560 pixels on the long edge leaves room to pan and zoom without softness. Full 12 megapixel frames mostly slow the editor down for no visible gain.

Why do my photos look washed out in the editor?

Usually an HDR gain map. A HEIC can carry brightness information that the Photos app applies and a video editor ignores, so the version you see on your phone is not the version the editor imported.

How do I keep my photos in the right order?

Convert the batch and keep the original filenames, which are usually sequential from the camera. Editors sort by name on import, so a consistent naming scheme does the ordering for you.

Do my photos keep their date after converting?

No. Converting rebuilds the image from pixels, so the EXIF block including the shooting date is dropped. Sort or rename before converting if the order matters.

Can I add narration without recording my own voice?

Yes — text-to-speech tools generate a voice track from a script, which is a common way to narrate a photo slideshow without setting up a microphone.

Are my photos uploaded when I convert them here?

No. Conversion runs entirely on your own device, which matters when the footage is personal or client work under an agreement.