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HEIC vs JPG: what's the difference, and which should you use?

Your iPhone saves photos as HEIC. The rest of the world mostly runs on JPG. If you’ve ever wondered whether that difference actually matters — and whether you’re losing anything by converting — here’s the honest, non-technical breakdown.

The one-sentence summary

HEIC makes smaller files with slightly better quality; JPG opens everywhere. That’s the whole trade-off. Everything below is detail.

What each format is

JPG (also written JPEG) has been the standard photo format since 1992. It’s lossy, meaning it throws away some detail to keep files small, but it does so cleverly enough that you usually can’t see the difference. Its superpower isn’t quality or size — it’s that literally every phone, computer, browser, printer and website made in the last thirty years can open it.

HEIC is much newer. Apple adopted it in 2017 as the default for iPhone and iPad photos. It stores the image using HEVC, the same compression family used for 4K video, which is why it’s so efficient. It also does things JPG can’t: keep multiple frames (Live Photos), store depth information, and hold wider colour.

File size: HEIC wins, clearly

This is HEIC’s headline feature. For the same photo at the same visible quality, a HEIC file is often about half the size of the equivalent JPG. On a phone holding thousands of photos, that adds up to real storage saved. If you shoot a lot and never leave Apple’s ecosystem, HEIC is genuinely working in your favour.

Quality: HEIC is a little better, but you won’t notice

At the same file size, HEIC preserves slightly more detail and smoother gradients than JPG, and it supports more colours (10-bit vs 8-bit). In side-by-side pixel-peeping you can sometimes spot the difference. In normal viewing — on a phone, on social media, in a print — you cannot. Don’t convert away from HEIC expecting a quality upgrade; converting to JPG preserves what you have, it doesn’t improve it.

Compatibility: JPG wins, and it isn’t close

Here’s where HEIC’s youth shows. Send a HEIC to:

  • an older Android phone — may not open it
  • a Windows PC — needs an extra codec installed
  • a website upload form — frequently rejected
  • older photo editors — often unsupported

JPG has none of these problems, anywhere. This single fact is why “how do I convert HEIC to JPG” is one of the most common questions iPhone owners ask.

So which should you use?

A simple rule that covers almost everyone:

Keep your originals as HEIC. Convert a copy to JPG whenever you need to share it outside Apple’s world.

You get the storage savings on your own device, and the recipient gets a file that just works. You lose nothing, because you still have the HEIC original.

If you’d rather not deal with HEIC at all, you can also tell your iPhone to shoot JPG directly: Settings → Camera → Formats → Most Compatible. Photos will take up more space, but they’ll be universally readable from the moment you take them.

What about PNG and WebP?

They’re worth knowing:

  • Convert HEIC to PNG when you need a lossless copy for editing, or transparency. Files are large.
  • Convert HEIC to WebP when you want the smallest universally-web-friendly file. Every modern browser reads WebP.

For sending photos to people, JPG remains the safest bet. For your own website, WebP is often the smarter one.

Converting without giving your photos away

One caution: many online HEIC-to-JPG converters upload your photo to their server to do the job. For an ordinary snapshot that’s usually fine; for anything private — documents, screenshots, personal photos — it means handing the file to a company you can’t see.

You don’t have to. Browser-based converters, like the one below, do the entire conversion on your own device. Nothing is uploaded, it works even in airplane mode, and there’s no limit on how many photos you convert at once. It’s the same result with none of the exposure — see how in-browser conversion works if you’re curious about the mechanics.

Bottom line

HEIC and JPG aren’t rivals so much as tools for different jobs. HEIC is the efficient format for storing photos on Apple devices; JPG is the universal format for sharing them anywhere. Keep both by keeping your originals and converting copies as needed — privately, on your own device, with the tool right here.