iPhone photos that will not open on Windows
Convert HEIC photos to JPEG so Windows and older software can open them. Runs in your browser — the photo is never uploaded.
Input
or click to choose
Images (JPG, PNG, WebP, HEIC, AVIF, GIF, SVG, BMP, ICO), audio (MP3, WAV, M4A, FLAC, OGG, Opus, AIFF) and video (MP4, MOV, WebM and more — audio extraction)
Result
Why these settings
Since iOS 11 an iPhone saves its photos as HEIC. Inside is HEVC — the compression used for video — which holds roughly the same picture in about half the space of a JPEG. The space is saved on the phone; the cost is that anything without an HEVC decoder sees a file it cannot open.
On Windows the photo usually opens once the image extension from the Microsoft Store is installed, and the part of it that decodes HEVC has at times been a paid add-on. Some machines ship with it, some do not, which is why one PC opens the photo and the next one refuses. For a handful of photos, converting is quicker than working out which case you are in.
The conversion costs something too. JPEG re-compresses an already-compressed image, so a little detail goes. The Live Photo video, the depth map behind portrait blur, and the HDR brightness information are not carried over — that last one is why a converted photo can look flatter than it did in the Photos app.
Often the better fix is not to convert at all. On the iPhone, Settings → Camera → Formats → Most Compatible makes every new photo a JPEG. For photos already taken, Settings → Photos → Transfer to Mac or PC → Automatic converts them on the way across. If you are back here every week, change the setting instead.
Common questions
- Can I just rename the file from .heic to .jpg?
- No. The extension is part of the name, not part of the encoding, so renaming leaves the same HEVC data inside a file claiming to be a JPEG. Whatever opens it then finds contents that do not match the label and either errors out or treats the file as corrupt. The data has to be rebuilt, which is what converting does.
- Are the date, camera and location kept?
- No. The conversion decodes the image to pixels and re-encodes from there, so all of the Exif — capture time, camera model, aperture, GPS — is dropped. For photos going online or to other people, losing the location is usually welcome. If you need the capture dates for filing, put them in the filenames before you convert.
- Can I convert a whole batch at once?
- Yes — the batch converter takes several files and applies the same settings to all of them. Everything still runs in the browser, so the more files you queue the harder your device works and the longer it takes. At the scale of hundreds of photos, changing the setting on the iPhone is the real fix.