On your iPhone, a Live Photo or a burst sits neatly under one thumbnail. Copy that folder to a computer and you face paired video clips, edit sidecars and dozens of separate HEIC files.
A Live Photo is two separate files on disk. Your iPhone saves the full-resolution still in an .HEIC file and the motion clip with sound in a companion .MOV file.
A burst is a loose pile of individual HEICs. Every frame you shoot in burst mode is written as its own standalone .HEIC file, grouped on your phone only by a shared metadata tag.
You only need the HEIC file to make a JPG. Leave the .MOV clips and .AAE edit files alone, pick the still frames you actually want, and convert those.
Apple's Photos app hides file extensions and glues related files into single thumbnails. The moment you plug your iPhone into a Windows PC over USB, open Image Capture on a Mac, or unpack an unmodified iCloud archive, that illusion vanishes. Inside folders named 100APPLE or 101APPLE, a single afternoon of shooting turns into a confusing mix of extensions and letter prefixes. People often try to convert what they think is a "HEIC video" to JPG, not realising the motion never lived inside the .HEIC file at all.
| What You Shot | Files on Disk | How iOS Groups Them | What to Convert to JPG |
|---|---|---|---|
| Standard photo | IMG_0001.HEIC | No grouping needed | IMG_0001.HEIC |
| Live Photo | IMG_0002.HEIC + IMG_0002.MOV | Matching ContentIdentifier UUID | IMG_0002.HEIC only |
| Cropped or new key photo | Original + IMG_E0002.HEIC + .AAE | Filename number + E prefix | IMG_E0002.HEIC |
| Burst sequence | IMG_0003.HEIC, IMG_0004.HEIC... | Shared BurstUUID in EXIF | Your sharpest single .HEIC |
When Live Photos are switched on, pressing the shutter captures one high-resolution still image alongside a short HEVC video clip covering the moments before and after your tap. Rather than stuffing the video stream inside the image file, iOS writes IMG_0002.HEIC and IMG_0002.MOV side by side. Inside Apple's metadata block in both files sits an identical ContentIdentifier string. Apple software reads that string and merges the pair; Windows File Explorer and web upload forms ignore it and show two separate items. For more on how browsers handle that split, see our guide to converting Live Photos to JPG.
There is one catch if you changed the main frame on your phone using Edit > Live > Make Key Photo. Because iOS never overwrites your original camera file, picking a new frame generates a rendered file with an E after the underscore — such as IMG_E0002.HEIC — plus a tiny .AAE XML recipe file. Always convert the IMG_E version if you want your chosen key frame or crop. Keep in mind that alternate frames pulled from the .MOV clip are lower resolution than the primary shutter frame, so only swap the key photo when someone blinked in the original.
On iPhone 11 and newer models, holding down the shutter button does not shoot a burst; it records a QuickTake .MOV video. You only get a true burst of .HEIC stills if you swipe the shutter button to the left and hold, or if you enable Settings > Camera > Use Volume Up for Burst. When you do trigger a real burst, your iPhone writes every single frame as a separate sequential .HEIC file on disk and stamps each one with the same BurstUUID tag inside Apple's MakerNote EXIF data.
Burst in the top-left corner.Done and choose Keep Only 1 Favourite so the phone deletes the rejected .HEIC files before you transfer anything.If the whole unpruned folder is already sitting on your hard drive, you can also convert the lot first to flick through standard previews — see how the browser handles converting large batches of HEIC files.
IMG_ originals and IMG_E edited renders, paired .MOV clips, .AAE sidecars and every unpruned burst frame..JPG. Clicking the three-dot menu and choosing Unmodified Original downloads a .ZIP containing the raw .HEIC and .MOV pair for Live Photos, or a .ZIP packed with every individual .HEIC frame for a burst.File > Export > Export Unmodified Original splits Live Photos back into their .HEIC and .MOV components.Once you separate the still images from the sidecars, converting them takes seconds. Leave any .MOV and .AAE files behind, grab your .HEIC stills (preferring the IMG_E file whenever you edited a shot on your phone), and drop them into the HEIC to JPG converter. Everything decodes locally inside your browser with no file upload, giving you clean 8-bit JPGs ready to send or archive.
Your photos are decoded in your own browser — open the converter and see.
First published: 1 November 2026