Convert HEIC to JPG

What you give up in the conversion

HEIC stores 10 bits per colour channel; JPEG stores 8. That difference is invisible in most photographs and shows up as faint banding in large smooth gradients — a clear sky at dusk is the classic case. It cannot be recovered afterwards.

The container also carries things a flat image format has nowhere to put: Live Photo motion, the depth map that portrait blur relies on, and the edit history that makes Revert possible on the phone. Converting produces a finished picture and discards the rest.

Convert once, from the original

JPEG is lossy, so every encode discards a little more. Converting an already-converted file compounds that for no reason. Go back to the HEIC each time rather than re-exporting a JPG you made earlier.

Keep the originals until you have checked the output. Deleting the HEIC masters is the only irreversible step in this process, and it is the one people do first.

JPG or PNG out

Pick JPG when the destination is an upload form, an email or long-term storage — the size saving is the entire reason the format exists and the quality cost at a high setting is not visible.

Pick PNG when the photo is going into further editing. It is lossless, so the conversion adds no generational damage, at the cost of a file several times larger than the HEIC you started with.

Order of operations for a camera roll

A holiday folder is the real case, and a few habits keep it clean.

• Convert the whole batch in one pass so the generational loss happens once.
• Convert first and compress second, as separate decisions — a converter that silently shrinks to hit a size target has chosen quality for you.
• Strip metadata at the same time if the photos are going somewhere public; every file is being rewritten anyway.
• Check a few outputs before deleting anything.