About
heic2jpeg.app is a free, browser-based tool for converting HEIC and HEIF photos to JPEG, PNG, or WebP. No software to install, no account to create, no file size limits. Just drop your photos and download the converted files.
Why This Tool Exists
Since iOS 11, every iPhone defaults to saving photos in HEIC format — High Efficiency Image Container. HEIC is genuinely better than JPEG: it compresses photos to roughly half the file size at equivalent quality, supports 16-bit color depth, and handles modern camera features like HDR and wide color gamut. Apple adopted it for good reasons.
The problem is that the rest of the world hasn't caught up. Windows does not support HEIC without a separately purchased codec. Android phones have inconsistent support depending on manufacturer and software version. Web browsers cannot display HEIC files inline. Social media platforms reject HEIC uploads. Most older photo editors simply refuse to open the files. For an iPhone user trying to share photos with anyone outside the Apple ecosystem, HEIC creates a constant, low-grade friction that shouldn't exist.
This tool exists to eliminate that friction. Drop your HEIC files in, get universally compatible images back, and move on with your day.
Privacy as a Design Constraint
Most online image converters work by uploading your files to a server, processing them remotely, and serving the results back to your browser. That means your photos touch someone else's infrastructure — potentially stored in a temporary directory, logged, or accessible to the operator. For personal photos, that's an unnecessary privacy risk.
heic2jpeg.app takes a different approach: every conversion happens entirely inside your browser using libheif-js, a WebAssembly port of the open-source libheif library. Your files are decoded in memory on your own device, rendered to an HTML5 Canvas, and exported as the format you choose. Nothing is transmitted over the network. There are no servers receiving your images — not because of a privacy policy, but because the architecture physically cannot send them anywhere.
Who Benefits
The typical user is an iPhone owner trying to share photos with family members on Windows or Android — people who don't know what a HEIC file is and don't care, they just want the photos to open. But the tool is also regularly used by photographers submitting images to editors or agencies that require JPEG, social media managers preparing content for platforms that reject HEIC uploads, HR departments processing employee ID photos taken on iPhones, and developers building workflows that need universally compatible image formats.
Technical Approach
The converter is built on Next.js and deployed as a static site with no server-side image processing. The core decoding is handled by libheif-js compiled to WebAssembly, which runs in the browser at near-native speed. Decoded pixel data is written to an HTML5 Canvas element, which exports the final image using the browser's native Canvas API. This means the output quality and format support are determined entirely by the browser — a modern approach that requires zero server infrastructure and zero ongoing bandwidth costs per conversion. That is why the tool can be offered free, with no usage limits, indefinitely.