the format that is better and that nothing accepts

what is actually inside a heic photo

two things wearing one name. HEIF is the container — a box that can hold one image, several images, an alpha channel, metadata, edits. HEVC, also called H.265, is the codec compressing the picture inside it: the one used for video, applied to a still frame.

that is where the size comes from. video compression is far better at finding redundancy than jpeg's method, designed in the late 1980s. Apple made heic the camera default in iOS 11 for that reason: the same phone holds twice as many photographs.

halving every photograph matters on a machine where you are already wondering where the disk went: what the space a cleaner finds is made of

there is no single picture in there

we opened four iPhone photographs with a box parser, and the answer is stranger than «one image plus extras». an ordinary 4032×2268 snapshot turned out to be forty-five separate items: forty-one HEVC images, a «grid», an Exif block and two blocks of XMP.

the forty-one are tiles: 512×512 pieces of the photograph, each compressed on its own, eight across by five down. the «grid» is the recipe for laying them back out. the full-size picture does not exist as a thing in the file. it is assembled on opening, which is what «a video codec applied to a still» means in practice.

a taller shot, 3213×5712, came to sixty-three items on 640×896 tiles: forty-two for the photograph, fifteen for a second half-size picture, and a «tmap» tying them together. that half-size picture is an HDR gain map — how far a bright display should push each area. so «several images in one file» is the ordinary case, portrait mode or not, and a jpeg copy drops the second one.

one honest limit: none of the fourteen heic files on this machine held a depth map or a video track. whatever a Live Photo's motion is stored as, it is not a track inside these stills — and we will not claim otherwise until we have opened one.

how much smaller is heic, actually

«about half» gets repeated everywhere without a number behind it, so here are ours. converting four iPhone photographs to jpeg with the built-in tool gave files 1.37, 1.46, 1.58 and 2.23 times the originals — the flatter the picture, the more heic wins.

a cleaner comparison — one source, one quality setting, a 3000×3000 image at the same «high» option: jpeg 458 KB, heic 175 KB, avif 46 KB. heic lands at 38% of the jpeg, so «roughly half» is if anything conservative. keep the avif number for the next section.

• more than 8 bits per colour channel, so skies do not band the way jpeg does.
• real transparency, which jpeg has never had.

the wider colour is what people notice second, usually when a picked colour does not match: get the hex code of a color on screen

why the web refused heic

not because of quality, and not because browser makers dislike Apple. HEVC is covered by a large number of patents licensed through several pools that did not agree with each other on terms — which made shipping a decoder in a free browser an open-ended legal commitment rather than a technical decision.

so Chrome and Firefox never added it, and a format no browser can display cannot become a format the web uses. that is the whole compatibility problem: not a bug, not a missing update, a licensing arrangement. Safari is the exception because Apple already pays for HEVC.

the web's answer was to build something else. AVIF uses AV1 — a codec built to be royalty-free by a consortium including Google, Mozilla, Netflix and, notably, Apple — and it does roughly what heic does with none of the licensing. every major browser supports it, which is why «convert heic to avif» and «convert heic to jpeg» are different questions.

the royalty-free terms are the design goal of AV1, and the alliance states them itself: alliance for open media

your Mac already writes avif — and cannot write webp

this is not abstract browser politics; it has landed on the machine in front of you. ask macOS 26.6.2 what it can read and write: avif comes back marked writable, webp without the mark. read one, yes. write one, no — it fails outright with «can't write format: org.webmproject.webp».

so the format the web settled on after the HEVC impasse is one your Mac now writes with a stock command, while webp — the one Google pushed first — is what nothing built in will write. the licensing story did not only decide what browsers display. it decided which converter you already have.

the commands, the Finder's batch route and what each costs live on the page that owns it: convert heic to jpg on Mac

and if you want a converter rather than a command: Mac file converter

the ending is not written yet. in March 2026 a W3C group formed to propose HEIF as a web format in its own right — the container, with AV1 inside rather than HEVC. which confirms what this page has been saying: the box was never the problem. the codec in it was.

the minutes are public, including the argument that we have been stuck on jpeg for thirty years: w3c, support for heif

what to do with your heic photos

• keep the heic originals. they are smaller and better, and your Mac and phone read them natively. convert only the copies you send elsewhere.
• jpeg when the destination is a form, a stranger, or anything old. universally accepted, and bigger than the original — expected, not a mistake.
• avif when the destination is a website: a tenth of the jpeg in our measurement, supported everywhere, and pointless outside a browser.
• AirDrop, iCloud sharing and Mail each have their own idea about converting on the way out, which is why the same picture reaches one person as heic and another as jpeg.

how to turn heic off on the iPhone, and what it costs

Settings → Camera → Formats → Most Compatible, and the camera writes jpeg from the moment you tap it. it does not touch the photographs you already have — those stay heic, and the conversion question stays with them.

the price is the number from earlier, running the other way: on the four we measured, the jpeg came out between 1.37 and 2.23 times the heic. you also give up the HDR gain map and the extra colour depth — the part nobody mentions, and cannot get back.

worth doing if you send photographs to non-Apple people daily. not worth doing to fix one upload form.

Apple documents the setting and what each option writes: using heif or hevc media on Apple devices

if storage is what pushed you here, photographs are rarely the biggest thing on the disk: find out what system data is using

why your videos are hevc too

the phone records HEVC video for the same reason it writes HEVC stills, and the friction repeats one layer up: a file that plays perfectly on Apple hardware and stalls elsewhere. same codec, same licensing — and the Formats setting switches both at once.

which is the thing to take away. «why will nothing open my file» has, on a Mac, one consistent answer: the format is newer and better, and the ecosystem that would have to pay for it declined. after that, the fix is not a hunt for a missing update but a question of where the file is going.

the video half of the same problem, and the repack that skips re-encoding: convert mov to mp4 on Mac

and when the destination has its own opinion about size and codec: compress video for reels and shorts

frequently asked questions

why are my photos heic instead of jpg?

the camera is set to High Efficiency, the default since iOS 11. it writes heic because the file is a third to a half the size of the same photograph as jpeg. Settings → Camera → Formats → Most Compatible switches it back.

why can't browsers open heic?

the codec inside it, HEVC, is covered by patents licensed through several pools on terms that made shipping a free decoder unattractive. Chrome and Firefox never added support, so the web went to AVIF instead.

is heic better than jpeg?

technically, clearly: on one source at the same quality setting we measured jpeg at 458 KB against heic at 175 KB, plus more colour depth and a second picture in the file. practically, only where it is supported — which is Apple's platforms. that gap is the reason anyone converts.

what is actually inside a heic file?

not one picture. an ordinary iPhone photograph we opened held forty-five items — forty-one 512×512 HEVC tiles plus a «grid» saying how to reassemble them. the image is built when you open the file.

should i switch my iPhone back to jpeg?

if you send photographs to non-Apple devices constantly, yes: Settings → Camera → Formats → Most Compatible. you give up roughly half your storage efficiency, the HDR gain map and the extra colour depth — and it changes nothing about the heic you already have.

does converting heic to jpeg lose quality?

a little — jpeg is lossy and the image is re-encoded. it also gets bigger: on the four we converted, the jpeg came out between 1.37 and 2.23 times the original. the HDR gain map and anything above 8 bits per channel are dropped entirely.