Guide
HEIC and iPhone photos
iPhones save photos as HEIC, a format that is small and good-looking and that a surprising number of websites, forms and computers still cannot open. Here is what that means for compressing them.
What HEIC is
HEIC is a still picture stored with the HEVC video codec inside a HEIF container. Apple made it the iPhone’s default in 2017 because it stores the same picture in roughly half the bytes of a JPEG. The catch is support: Windows needs an extension to open it, many upload forms accept only JPG, JPEG or PNG, and most browsers other than Safari cannot decode it.
What changes when it becomes a JPEG
- The file usually gets larger at the same quality, not smaller: HEIC is the more efficient format. A compressed JPEG at quality 76 and a capped long edge is still much smaller than the original HEIC for most uses.
- Transparency and depth data (Portrait mode) are not carried into a JPEG.
- Capture information (date, camera, location) is not carried over from HEIC in this build. The row says so, and the original keeps it.
- Live Photos are a still and a short movie. Only the still is compressed; the movie is counted and left alone.
Which browsers can open HEIC here
This site does not ship a HEIC decoder of its own, so it uses the browser’s. Safari on a Mac, iPhone or iPad decodes HEIC, and there the compress iPhone photos page turns HEIC into small JPEGs. In Chrome, Edge and Firefox each HEIC is left alone with that reason on its row, and the rest of the set runs normally. Nothing is uploaded to convert it somewhere else.
Sending them on
For email, compress photos for email holds the whole set to one total. For a form, reduce photo size in KB writes JPEG to the exact size asked.