Working With HEIC Image Files

If you’re an Apple user, you’re probably storing your photos in the HEIC format, whether you know it or not. This tends to come up when you’re trying to send a photo and it isn’t compatible with non-Apple apps.

Don’t worry, I’ll show you how to change this setting and offer alternative solutions for converting these files below.

What is HEIC?

Are you taking thousands of images with your iPhone camera like I am? Then you will love using the High Efficiency format in your camera setting! The way I look at it, I’m getting double the storage. As it currently stands, I have over 26,000 images and 1,400 videos stored on my iPhone.

HEIC stands for High Efficiency Image Compression and in the most simple terms: it is compressing the size of the image without losing all the high quality data.

The most important thing to understand is that you can convert to other image types, and there are several ways to do this.

Change Your iPhone Setting

If you don’t want to have to worry about converting the images, you can change your settings super quickly in your iphone camera settings. I’m including a 5 second video if you want to follow along, or simply follow these steps:

1. Go to Settings
2. Click Camera
3. Click Formats
4. Change from High Efficiency to Most Compatible
5. When the blue checkmark is next to Most Compatible, you’re done!

Quickly Convert Multiple Images to JPG

You can use an app on your phone, or download software in order to convert several images at once.

• If you’re using a computer, this quick website does it for you without downloading any app or software: https://imageconverter.io.

• For those who may need to do this often, this is a software you can download on your desktop: https://imazing.com/heic. 

• There’s also an app for your phone called The Image Converter – you can download in the Apple store.

• And then, of course, you can import them into Lightroom and export as jpegs (which would be my go to since I’m in Lightroom daily).

Converting a Single Image

On a Mac, you can simply rename the file to .jpg or .png and a pop up should come up that says “do you want to convert” and once you click yes it will convert to the format you’ve entered.

What apps will open a .HEIC file?

Adobe Lightroom will open HEIC images, as will any app that is created and supported by Apple. If you’re a Windows user, you’ll probably have to use one of the conversion apps / software mentioned above.

If you’re fully immersed in the Apple ecosystem like I am, chances are this isn’t a topic you’ll come across often. However, technology doesn’t always go our way, and in those instances hopefully one of the above methods will help navigate converting your image from the HEIC format to a JPG or PNG file.