What is a HEIC file?
A HEIC file is a photo stored in the High Efficiency Image File format, HEIF, using HEVC compression. iPhone 7 and later have saved photos this way since iOS 11 in 2017, whenever the camera is set to High Efficiency. Apple chose it because the files take less space than JPEG at the same quality. The trouble is that many other devices and websites still expect JPEG.
See what the quality setting does
Drag the line to compare the original with the JPEG at the quality you chose. The loupe shows a 3× crop under your pointer.
The names, untangled
| Term | What it is |
|---|---|
| HEIF | High Efficiency Image File format. A container, standardised by MPEG as ISO/IEC 23008-12, that can hold one or more images, plus thumbnails, depth maps and edits. |
| HEVC | High Efficiency Video Coding, also called H.265. The compression used for the picture inside a HEIC file. |
| HEIC | The extension the HEIF standard assigns to a file whose image is HEVC-compressed. This is what your iPhone produces. |
| HEIF (.heif) | The same container with another codec inside, such as H.264 (AVC). AV1 in the same container is usually called AVIF and uses .avif. |
Why Apple uses it
Apple's support page says HEIF and HEVC "offer better compression than JPEG and H.264, so they use less storage space on your devices and iCloud Photos, while preserving the same visual quality." A HEIC can also carry more than one image and richer metadata, and the format has room for depth maps and for edits stored as instructions. A Live Photo is different: exported from Photos on a Mac in its original format, it comes out as two separate files, a still and a video.
Why it causes trouble
HEVC is patent-licensed. Operating systems and apps that don't pay for or bundle a decoder can't open the picture. Windows charges for the HEVC part of the decoder; some websites accept only JPG or PNG. So a photo that is perfectly good on the phone can fail once it leaves Apple's devices.
How to open a HEIC anywhere
Drop it on the tray at the top of this page. Your browser decodes it, shows it, and offers a JPEG. Nothing is uploaded. For the platform-specific fixes: Windows, Mac, Android.
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