You drag an iPhone photo onto a slide and get a file icon, a red X, or a grey box instead of a picture. Here is what Word and PowerPoint actually do to HEIC files behind the scenes, and how to make the photo show up on every computer.
Dragging a HEIC file into older Office versions embeds it as a dead file object, not a picture. If your computer lacks the HEVC video codec or runs Office 2016 or earlier, Word and PowerPoint wrap the file in an Object Linking and Embedding (OLE) container and draw a generic icon or grey placeholder.
Even when a HEIC photo looks fine on your screen, it can break when you send the deck to someone else. Certain versions of Office store the original HEIC stream inside the .pptx or .docx archive and rely on the viewer's operating system to decode it on the fly.
Converting to a standard 8-bit JPG before inserting is the only way to guarantee the image renders everywhere. Every version of Word and PowerPoint since 1997 has a built-in JPEG decoder that requires no external codecs.
When you drag a photo from File Explorer onto a slide or document, Office inspects the file header. If it recognises a supported raster format like JPEG or PNG, it hands the file to its internal graphics filter. If it sees a .heic file and cannot find a system-level decoder, it falls back to OLE packaging.
Instead of placing pixels on the page, Office embeds the raw file as an attachment and draws a grey box or a document icon. In other cases, a colleague sends you a .docx file where they inserted a HEIC photo on a Mac. Your Windows machine opens the document, looks inside the internal word/media/ folder, finds a HEIC stream it cannot decode, and draws a white box with a red X and the message This image cannot currently be displayed.
File > Options > Advanced > Show document content, or the system decoder is stalling on a 10-bit HEIC tile grid.Modern Office documents (.docx and .pptx) are ZIP archives. If you rename a presentation to .zip and open it, you can see the exact image files sitting inside ppt/media/. What ends up in that folder depends entirely on your Office version and operating system.
| Office Version | Menu Path Used | What Happens on Your Screen | What Goes Inside the File |
|---|---|---|---|
| Office 2016 and older (Windows) | Drag and drop | Shows a grey box or file icon | An <code>oleObject.bin</code> wrapper in <code>ppt/embeddings/</code> |
| Office 2019 / 2021 / 365 (Windows without HEIF/HEVC extensions) | <code>Insert > Pictures > This Device</code> | Throws an error: <em>An error occurred while importing this file</em> | Nothing; the insert is blocked |
| Microsoft 365 (Windows with codecs installed) | <code>Insert > Pictures > This Device</code> | Displays the photo normally | Converts or wraps depending on build; older readers may still see a red X |
| Microsoft 365 for Mac | Drag and drop from Finder | Displays the photo via macOS QuickTime/ImageIO | Often stores the raw HEIC or TIFF fallback, swelling file size |
If you are fighting missing system codecs on a work PC where the Microsoft Store is locked down, our guide on handling HEIC to JPG on Windows explains why Microsoft splits the container reader and the video codec into two separate installs.
A common workaround is opening the HEIC file in Windows Photos or macOS Preview, pressing Ctrl+C (or Cmd+C), and pasting directly into Word or PowerPoint. This avoids the grey box because the viewer application decodes the image and puts an uncompressed bitmap onto the system clipboard.
The catch is what Office does with that clipboard bitmap. Because clipboard data has no file format header, Word and PowerPoint frequently save pasted bitmaps inside the document's media/ folder as uncompressed or lightly compressed .png or .tiff files. Do this with twenty iPhone photos and your slide deck balloons in size, making it impossible to send without hitting the limits covered in our email attachments guide.
To keep your document small and readable on every computer—including older Windows laptops, web browsers, and Linux machines running LibreOffice—feed Office a baseline 8-bit JPEG file.
.heic files to .jpg before opening Office.Insert > Pictures > This Device (or drag the new .jpg files directly from Explorer or Finder).File > Options > Advanced > Image Size and Quality and ensure Do not compress images in file is ticked so Office does not strip or misread orientation tags.When you insert a standard JPG from disk, Office copies the exact JPEG byte stream directly into the document's media folder without re-encoding it into a bloated PNG.
You can turn your iPhone photos into standard 8-bit JPGs right now using the HEIC to JPG converter on our front page. Drop your files into the box, save the JPGs, and drag them straight into your presentation. Everything happens inside your browser tab with no upload, so confidential work slides and document photos never leave your computer.
Your photos are decoded in your own browser — open the converter and see.
First published: 25 October 2026