Why HEIC exists
By 2015 the JPEG standard was more than twenty years old, and video compression had moved a very long way in the meantime. HEIF was the result of a straightforward idea: take the advances made in video coding and apply them to still pictures.
A HEIC file is, structurally, a single video frame in a container. The compression doing the work is HEVC — the same codec used for 4K streaming — and it is dramatically more efficient than JPEG’s 1992-vintage approach.
Apple adopted it in iOS 11 and made it the camera default. Across a billion devices, halving the size of every photograph is a saving measured in exabytes.
What HEIC is genuinely good at
- Size. Around half a comparable JPG, at the same visual quality.
- Colour depth. 16 bits per channel, against JPG’s 8. That matters for editing, where 8-bit files band visibly when you push exposure.
- Transparency. An alpha channel, which JPG has never had.
- Sequences. Multiple images in one file, which is how Live Photos and burst shots are stored.
Where it lets you down
Everywhere that is not Apple.
Windows needs a codec extension. Many Android devices cannot open the files. Print services, older photo editors, plenty of web upload forms and a long tail of desktop software simply reject them.
The reason is licensing rather than technical difficulty. HEVC is covered by a large and contested patent pool, which makes shipping a decoder a commercial decision rather than an engineering one. JPG has no such encumbrance, which is a large part of why it is still everywhere.
HEIC cannot be created in a browser
This is worth stating plainly, because it shapes what any web tool can offer.
Browsers can decode HEIC — this site does it with libheif compiled to WebAssembly. No browser can encode it, because the patent situation makes shipping an encoder untenable.
So you will find HEIC converters that turn HEIC into other things. You will not find one that turns other things into HEIC, here or anywhere else that runs in a browser.
What to convert it to
- JPG — for anything you send to another person, or upload to a form. Universally readable.
- PNG — for editing, or when you need a lossless working copy. Expect a much larger file.
- WebP — for a website you control. Smaller than JPG, supported by every current browser.
If you want the reasoning rather than the shortcut, HEIC vs JPG works through the trade-off properly.