Open Settings, tap Camera, tap Formats, tap Most Compatible. From that moment the Camera app writes JPEG instead of HEIC, and H.264 instead of HEVC for video. It applies to what you shoot from then on — the HEIC photos already sitting in your library are not touched and stay HEIC.
Short answer: Settings → Camera → Formats → Most Compatible. Apple’s own wording in its support document Using HEIF or HEVC media on Apple devices is “All new photos and videos will now use JPEG or H.264 format.” The word new is the whole catch: nothing you have already taken is re-encoded, so your existing HEIC files stay HEIC. Switching back is the same menu — choose High Efficiency.
What I measured on this site: the part that trips people up is not the setting, it is telling afterwards whether a file is really HEIC or really JPEG — because the filename does not decide that. I built files whose names lie (JPEG bytes called .heic, HEIC bytes called .jpg, and one with no extension at all), drove a real Chrome browser against this converter today and pushed each one in. Every verdict came from the file’s bytes, never from its name: the JPEG renamed to .heic was refused in 461 ms, while the HEIC renamed to .jpg converted normally in 1,137 ms. Full numbers below.
Apple notes that the Formats option only appears on devices that can capture in HEIF or HEVC at all — iPhone 7 and iPhone 7 Plus or later, and iPad 6th generation or later, running iOS 11 or later. If your phone is older than that, it was never writing HEIC in the first place.
There is nothing to confirm and no restart. The next photo you take is a JPEG.
After you change the setting you will want to know whether a given file is actually HEIC. The filename is not evidence. I took one real HEIC from an iPhone (41,465 bytes, 700×476) and one real JPEG decoded from it (38,869 bytes, same pixels), then made copies whose names contradict their contents and fed all of them to the converter at the default 85% quality, one fresh page load per file:
| File name given | What the bytes actually are | Result | Time |
|---|---|---|---|
IMG_1001.HEIC | HEIC | Converted — IMG_1001.jpg, 38,078 bytes | 1,272 ms |
IMG_1002.heic | HEIC | Converted — IMG_1002.jpg, 38,078 bytes | 887 ms |
IMG_1003.jpg | HEIC | Converted — IMG_1003.jpg.jpg, 38,078 bytes | 1,137 ms |
IMG_1004.jpg | JPEG | Refused | 453 ms |
IMG_1005.heic | JPEG | Refused | 461 ms |
IMG_1006.HEIF | HEIC | Converted — IMG_1006.jpg, 38,078 bytes | 873 ms |
IMG_1007 (no extension) | HEIC | Converted — IMG_1007.jpg, 38,078 bytes | 1,258 ms |
Three things fall out of that. First, capitals do not matter: iPhone hands out files with the extension in capitals (IMG_0001.HEIC), and the uppercase file converted the same as the lowercase one. Second, the name is decoration — a JPEG called .heic was refused in 461 ms through the file picker and in 447 ms when dragged in, no slower than a JPEG honestly called .jpg, and with the same message:
“Could not convert this file. Make sure it is a valid HEIC or HEIF photo from an iPhone.”
Third, there is one real quirk. The page strips only a trailing .heic or .heif before adding .jpg, so a genuine HEIC that happens to be named .jpg comes back as IMG_1003.jpg.jpg. Still a perfectly good JPEG — just a filename you will want to fix by hand.
I also checked whether the file picker’s filter was what rejected the JPEGs. It is not. The accept attribute on the input is .heic,.heif,image/heic,image/heif, which would grey a .jpg out in the browse dialog — but drag-and-drop ignores that filter entirely, and when I dragged the HEIC-in-a-.jpg-name file onto the drop zone it converted in 951 ms. So the refusal of real JPEGs comes from the decoder hitting bytes it cannot read, not from a filename check.
1. Look at the first bytes. You do not need an app. A HEIC file starts with a 4-byte box length, then the text ftypheic. In hexadecimal the first twelve bytes of the HEIC I used are
00 00 00 18 66 74 79 70 68 65 69 63 — the last eight spell ftypheic
A JPEG starts with FF D8 FF E0 followed by JFIF. On a Mac, xxd -l 12 photo.heic in Terminal shows you this; on Windows, PowerShell’s Format-Hex -Count 12 photo.heic does the same. If you see ftypheic, it is HEIC whatever the icon says.
2. Drop it in the converter. Because the decoder reads bytes, the page is itself a HEIC detector. Drag the file onto the converter: a JPG comes out if it was HEIC, and the error above comes back if it was not. Nothing is uploaded — the test happens on your own device, and the page still works after you lose the connection, which I measured separately in the offline test.
The case for switching anyway is the one where none of that helps: a site or an app with an upload box that simply refuses HEIC, on a machine that is not an Apple one and has no import step in between.
Flipping the setting does nothing for them, so they need converting one by one. That is what this converter is for: pick the file, choose a quality, and download the JPG. Two things to know before you start a pile of them:
No. It makes future photos and videos larger, not smaller — HEIF and HEVC exist precisely because they store the same picture in fewer bytes. Existing files are not recompressed, so nothing shrinks. Switching buys compatibility and costs storage.
Only for the photos you took before you switched. Everything the camera writes from that point on is already a JPEG. The reliable way to tell which is which is the file’s first bytes, or just dropping the file into the converter and seeing whether it converts or refuses.
Yes. Apple’s wording covers both: after choosing Most Compatible, new videos use H.264 instead of HEVC. If you only want stills changed, there is no separate switch — it is one setting for both.
This one does. I fed it an uppercase .HEIC and an uppercase .HEIF and both converted normally, in 1,272 ms and 873 ms, producing .jpg files with the capitals gone. Case is not something you need to fix.
Because the converter decodes the contents, and a JPEG is not a HEIC no matter what you call it. Measured: a real JPEG renamed to .heic was refused in 461 ms with the same error a normal JPEG gets. Renaming changes the label, not the file.
I did not measure that, and I will not put a number here — it depends on your camera and on the JPEG encoder in your iPhone, which I cannot run. What I can tell you is what this converter produced from one real 41,465-byte iPhone HEIC at 85%: a 38,078-byte JPEG. That is this tool’s encoder on this file, not what your iPhone would write.
Try it: open the converter and drop in a photo you suspect is HEIC. If it comes back as a JPG, it was. If it shows the error, it was already JPEG.
First published: 26 September 2026