HEIF to JPG Converter

HEIF stands for High Efficiency Image File Format. It was published by MPEG as ISO/IEC 23008-12 and is best known from the iPhone, which saves its photos as HEIC. HEIC is simply HEIF with HEVC-coded pictures inside, and the two extensions are often used for the same thing.

Outside Apple, HEIF shows up in two other places. Several Android phones offer a high-efficiency photo setting that saves pictures as .heif to save storage. And recent mirrorless cameras from Canon, Fujifilm and Sony can record 10-bit HEIF files with a .hif extension, as a lighter alternative to RAW that still holds more tonal range than JPEG.

Those camera files are the ones that confuse people most. They open on the camera's own screen and in the maker's software, then appear as unknown files, blank thumbnails or strangely flat images almost everywhere else.

The main loss in this direction is bit depth. Baseline JPEG, as defined in ITU-T T.81, stores 8 bits per color channel. A 10-bit HEIF has four times as many steps per channel, which matters for heavy editing of shadows and skies, but not for looking at or printing a finished photo.

Files will usually grow, because JPEG compresses less efficiently than HEVC. Quality 90 is preset here because camera photos tend to be large and detailed, and they are often printed. If you need smaller files for sharing, move the slider down or set a smaller longest side under Resize output.

The sheet shows why HEIF is more capable than JPG on paper: it can carry transparency, several images in one file and both lossy and lossless coding. In practice, phones and cameras use it for single lossy photos, sometimes with a depth map or a burst attached. The converter writes the main image, which is the picture you see in the gallery.

Support is the weak point. Safari shows HEIC images from version 17, but Chrome, Edge and Firefox do not, and Android leaves the decoder optional for phone makers. Windows needs an extra extension from the Microsoft Store. JPG has none of these gaps.

Camera HEIF files often record color in a wider space than the sRGB standard that screens and browsers assume, and some use an HDR curve. If a program ignores that information, the photo looks dull or grey. That is why Color space is preset to sRGB on this page: the converter translates the colors so the JPG looks the same in a browser, on a phone and at a print kiosk.

If you work in a color-managed editor and want the original space, choose Keep original under Advanced settings and leave Keep color profile ticked. The profile then travels with the JPG and the editor can read it. For editing with the full 10-bit range, a lossless target such as PNG is the better choice, and HEIC to PNG is set up for that.