Your iPhone can already do this
Most pages about how to convert HEIC to JPG on iPhone want to sell you an app. We would rather start by telling you that iOS has this built in.
For one or two photos, the Files app is faster than any website, including this one.
Share the photo to Files, then press and hold the file, tap Quick Actions, and tap Convert Image. Pick JPEG and you are done. Nothing is uploaded, nothing is installed, and the whole thing takes about four taps.
That is the honest answer for the common case, and it is worth knowing before you go looking for software.
So when is a browser converter the better choice?
There are three situations where the built-in route stops being the best way to convert HEIC to JPG on iPhone.
Batches. Quick Actions works on a selection, but you are still in the Files app moving things around. If you have sixty photos to convert and get back as one file, a page that hands you a .zip is less work.
Quality control. Convert Image gives you no quality setting at all. If you need a smaller file for an upload limit, you have no dial to turn.
Photos that are not yours. When someone AirDrops or emails you HEIC files, they land outside your photo library, and the tidy Photos-app workflows do not apply.
| Situation | Best method |
|---|---|
| One or two photos | Files, Quick Actions |
| A whole album, repeatedly | Shortcuts |
| A batch, right now, no setup | This page |
| Need a specific file size | This page |
| Want to keep the date and GPS | Files, Quick Actions |
| Stop the problem for good | Change two settings |
How to convert HEIC to JPG on iPhone with this page
1. Open the page in Safari
Chrome and Firefox for iOS work too. They all run Safari’s engine underneath, so the behaviour is identical.
2. Pick your photos
Tap the button and choose photos from your library, from iCloud Drive, or from wherever they landed after someone sent them.
3. Convert and save
Tap Convert. Every photo is decoded on the phone and handed back as a JPG, which Safari saves into the Downloads folder in Files.
From there you can move them into Photos, attach them to an email, or share them anywhere.
The same engine runs our desktop HEIC to JPG converter and HEIC to PNG converter, if you would rather do this on a computer.
Sometimes iOS converts for you already
Before converting anything by hand, check whether the photo is going somewhere that handles it for you.
Attaching a photo to an email on an iPhone generally sends a JPEG, because Mail favours compatibility over efficiency. Messaging apps almost always re-compress to JPEG as well, usually more aggressively than you would have.
AirDrop is the exception that catches people out. AirDropping to a Mac sends the original HEIC untouched, which is exactly right for archiving and exactly wrong if the Mac is going to hand the file to an app that cannot read it.
So if the complaint is “the photo I emailed opened fine but the one I AirDropped did not”, nothing is broken. Those two paths genuinely behave differently.
The Shortcuts route, for people who do this often
If converting HEIC to JPG on iPhone is a monthly chore rather than a one-off, build it once in Shortcuts and it becomes a single tap forever after.
The shortcut is three actions: Select Photos, then Convert Image, then Save to Photos. Turn on Select Multiple in the first action so it accepts a batch.
Add it to your home screen and converting an album becomes: tap the icon, pick the photos, done.
This is the best long-term answer for recurring work on your own library. It costs five minutes to set up, which is exactly why it is the wrong answer when you have one batch to convert right now.
Stop making new HEIC files: two settings, not one
Nearly every guide mentions the camera setting and stops there. There are two, and the second one is the one people actually needed.
Settings, Camera, Formats, Most Compatible. From then on the camera captures JPEG instead of HEIC. This only affects new photos — everything already in your library stays HEIC.
Settings, Photos, Transfer to Mac or PC, Automatic. This is the one that fixes the classic complaint: photos look fine on the iPhone but arrive as unopenable HEIC files on a Windows PC. On Automatic, iOS converts them on the way out over USB.
If your problem is specifically that your computer cannot open the photos you copied across, that second setting solves it without converting anything by hand.
The trade-off with Most Compatible is real, though. JPEG files are meaningfully larger than HEIC at the same quality, so your phone storage fills faster. Our HEIC vs JPG comparison has the numbers, and how to turn off HEIC on an iPhone has the full walkthrough with screenshots.
Which quality setting to pick
The built-in Convert Image action makes this choice for you. Here you get the slider, so it is worth knowing where to put it.
We measured a 12 megapixel photo through this exact converter. At quality 85 it came out at 1.27 MB, and at quality 75 it came out at 0.86 MB. On a phone screen the two are indistinguishable.
Leave it at the default for anything you might print or edit later. Drop to 75 when the photo is heading into a chat app, which will re-compress it anyway, or when an upload form is enforcing a limit.
If the file size is the actual requirement rather than the format, our HEIC compressor lets you name a target in KB or MB and finds the quality that fits.
What each method does to your metadata
This is where the methods genuinely differ, and no comparison table on the internet seems to mention it.
Converting here re-encodes the pixels through a canvas, which does not carry the EXIF block across. The shooting date, camera settings and GPS coordinates are dropped from the JPG.
For sharing, that is usually a feature. You probably do not want the coordinates of your home attached to a photo going to a stranger.
For archiving, it is a loss. The Files app method generally preserves that data, so use it when the date and location matter.
The visible side effect is that converted files can sort oddly in Photos, since the app leans on the date inside the file. If you want to see exactly what a photo carries before deciding, our HEIC EXIF viewer reads all of it on your device.
Does it really work in Safari?
Worth being specific, because a vague “works on all modern browsers” is how sites avoid answering this.
This converter needs iOS 16.4 or later. That release is when Safari gained the off-screen canvas the decoder draws into. Every browser on an iPhone is required to use Safari’s engine, so installing Chrome does not change the requirement.
On anything newer than that, which is the overwhelming majority of iPhones in use, it runs the same code as a desktop. A 12 megapixel photo takes a second or two.
Very large batches are the one thing to be careful with. Decoding holds real memory, and Safari is stricter about reclaiming it than desktop browsers are. Twenty or thirty photos at a time is comfortable; several hundred at once is asking for a reloaded tab.
Does the same thing work on an iPad?
Yes, identically. iPadOS shares the Files app, the Shortcuts app and the same Safari engine, so every method on this page applies unchanged.
The only practical difference is that an iPad usually has more memory to work with, so larger batches go through more comfortably than they do on a phone.
Android users have their own version of this problem, and a slightly different set of answers, in our guide to converting HEIC to JPG on Android.
The bottom line
On an iPhone you have three good options and you should pick by situation rather than by habit.
Files and Quick Actions for a couple of photos. That is the fastest way to convert HEIC to JPG on iPhone when you only have a few. A Shortcut if this is a recurring job on your own library. This page when you want a batch converted right now, with a quality setting, without building anything first.
Then change the two settings so you stop generating the problem. Convert what you have, fix the source, and this becomes a page you never need again.