Convert iPhone photos to JPG

The capture format

Settings, then Camera, then Formats offers 'High Efficiency' and 'Most Compatible'. The first captures HEIC and roughly halves the storage each photo uses. The second captures JPEG and produces files that open anywhere.

The trade is storage and colour depth against compatibility. Nothing here changes photos you have already taken, which is why switching it rarely solves the problem someone actually has.

The transfer setting most people never see

At the bottom of Settings, then Photos, there is 'Transfer to Mac or PC' with two options. On 'Automatic' the phone converts HEIC to JPEG as it copies over a cable. On 'Keep Originals' it hands across the HEIC untouched.

A great many people have this on Keep Originals without knowing, which is why photos that display perfectly on the phone arrive on a laptop as files nothing will open. Changing it fixes future cable transfers and does nothing for files already copied.

Why the route off the phone matters

The same photo arrives in different formats depending on how it travelled. AirDrop to a Mac preserves HEIC. Most messaging apps convert to JPEG and heavily recompress. Email attachments are often converted. A cable transfer depends on the setting above.

So 'I already sent it to myself' is not a reliable conversion step — it frequently produces a much lower quality JPEG than converting deliberately would, because a chat app optimises for bandwidth rather than for your photo.

Converting a backlog

For photos already taken, converting is the only route, and the order of operations matters.

• Work from the HEIC originals rather than from anything a chat app returned.
• Convert the batch once — repeated JPEG encodes compound the loss.
• Choose PNG instead if the photo is going into further editing.
• Keep the originals until you have checked the output, then reclaim the space.