Open iPhone photos on anything
Since iOS 11 an iPhone saves photos as HEIC by default, because it is roughly half the size of the equivalent JPEG. The catch is everything else: Windows Photo Viewer, most web upload forms, older Android phones, Slack previews and a great deal of desktop software simply refuse the file.
This converts them on your own device. Select a whole camera roll's worth at once — there is no per-file limit and no queue, because there is no server doing the work.
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Worth knowing
- JPEG unless you have a reason
- It is the format every piece of software on earth opens. PNG is worth it only if you need transparency or are about to edit the image; it will usually be several times larger than the HEIC you started with.
- Safari does this natively, other browsers don't
- Safari can decode HEIC itself, so on a Mac or an iPhone nothing is downloaded. Chrome and Firefox cannot, so the first HEIC you convert there fetches a decoder — about 1.5 MB, once, then cached. You are told before it happens.
- The location data comes off
- Photos carry the GPS coordinates of where they were taken, which is frequently someone's home. Converting rebuilds the image from its pixels, so the EXIF block does not survive — that is not an option you have to remember to tick.