Your Mac already has a converter. Here is the route Apple documents — and, measured, what the browser route costs if you would rather not touch Photos.
Short answer: open the HEIC in Preview and choose File › Export, then set Format to JPEG. Apple’s Preview user guide lists what it can write as HEIC, JPEG, JPEG-2000, OpenEXR, PDF, PNG and TIFF, and notes that picking JPEG or JPEG-2000 lets you adjust image quality. Nothing to install, nothing uploaded, and it is already on the machine — that is the route I would reach for first on a Mac.
What I measured on this site: I could not run macOS today — every number below comes from a Windows machine driving a real Chrome against this converter, so read them as the cost of the browser route, not of Preview. One 12 MP HEIC (4,032×3,024, 1,267,632 bytes) came out at 1,296,915 bytes at 75%, 1,708,595 bytes at 85% and 2,899,616 bytes at 95% — all baseline JPEGs, all with the same sRGB profile, all with no EXIF at all. Ten photos in a row at the default 85% took 30.9 seconds of wall clock, 2,961 ms per photo on average.
From Apple’s Preview user guide, the steps are:
Apple adds one detail worth knowing: “If you don’t see the file type you want, hold the Option key and click the Format pop-up menu to see specialised or older formats.” So if a format is missing from the menu, it is usually there behind the Option key rather than absent.
Mac users also point to a Finder right-click Quick Action, the sips command in Terminal, Automator and Shortcuts folders, and Photos › File › Export. I confirmed none of those in Apple’s documentation today and I ran none of them — there was no Mac involved in this page. So I am not publishing menu paths or timings for them. If you want to settle which route suits you, do the one-minute check at the bottom of this page; it takes one photo and gives you your own answer.
The page offers exactly three quality settings — High — 95%, Good — 85% (the default) and Smaller file — 75%. Here is what each did to the same file, and what the output contained:
| Setting | JPG out | Against the HEIC | Time | Resolution | EXIF | Frame |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
0.75 — Smaller file — 75% | 1,296,915 bytes | 1.02× | 9,108 ms | 4,032×3,024 | None | FFC0 baseline |
0.85 — Good — 85% | 1,708,595 bytes | 1.35× | 4,936 ms | 4,032×3,024 | None | FFC0 baseline |
0.95 — High — 95% | 2,899,616 bytes | 2.29× | 3,225 ms | 4,032×3,024 | None | FFC0 baseline |
Do not read those three times as a speed ranking: the 75% run was the first conversion after a fresh page load, and the first one is always the slow one. The ten-photo run below, all at the same 85%, spread from 2,668 ms to 3,512 ms, which is the honest size of the run-to-run noise. What the quality setting really changes is the size: from barely bigger than the HEIC at 75% to more than twice its size at 95%.
Every one of the three outputs carried a JFIF header, a 472-byte sRGB ICC profile, and no EXIF segment whatsoever — no camera model, no timestamp, no GPS. That was measured by reading the file’s markers, the same way I did in the upload-form test.
I converted the same 12 MP file ten times over — same bytes each time, different file names, because the input ignores a repeat pick of an identical path — at the default 85%:
photo_01.jpg through photo_10.jpg).That is the real cost of the browser route on a folder: about half a minute of waiting and ten separate downloads for ten photos, because the file input is single-select and the page does one at a time. The measured cost of a much bigger pile — two hundred files — is in the 200-file run.
Whatever you find, the file never leaves your machine either way: this page decodes on your own device.
I do not know. Apple’s documented steps are for one file open in Preview, and I did not test a folder — there was no Mac involved in this page today.
Not measured. I have a number for the browser route — 30.9 seconds for ten 12 MP photos — and none at all for macOS, so I will not compare them.
No. There is no EXIF segment in the output at any of the three quality settings — confirmed by reading the file’s markers, and written up in the EXIF test.
For handing a photo to a person or a website, the default 85% gave 1,708,595 bytes from a 1,267,632-byte HEIC. If the destination has a size cap, 75% gave 1,296,915 bytes — only 1.02× the original. The full trade-off across more files is in the file-size measurements.
For the first load of the page, yes — the decoder is fetched once. After that the conversion runs with the network off, which I measured in the offline test.
sips were not run, so no timings, sizes or metadata claims are made about any of them.sips and Automator steps — I could not confirm them in Apple’s documentation today, so I gave no menu path for them rather than invent one.On a Mac right now? Open the converter and convert one photo — it runs on your machine, and you can compare it with Preview in a minute.
First published: 27 September 2026