Convert HEIC to JPEG on a Mac
Drag the HEIC files into Images by Edmund, choose JPEG from the format menu and press Export. A whole camera roll's worth goes through in one pass. If you are sending the photos to somebody else, turn off Keep EXIF and GPS first and the location, camera model and timestamps come out before the file leaves your Mac.
macOS 15 or later. Apple silicon Mac. Version 1.1.0, out 11 October 2026. What’s new.
Free, with nothing to unlock and no account.
Opening a HEIC is the part most browsers cannot do. Safari and anything on an iPhone manage it; Chrome and Firefox on a desktop do not. A converter here would work for some readers and quietly do nothing for the rest, so this job stays with the app, which reads these files the way Preview does.
Some of the other jobs do run here in the browser: SVG to PNG, Lossless compression, PNG to WebP, JPEG to WebP, WebP to PNG, PDF to PNG, PNG to ICO, PNG or SVG to ICNS and Bulk resizing.
HEIC to JPEG, step by step
- Drag the photos inA handful, or the whole folder you dragged off your phone. Every file gets the same treatment, so there is no reason to do them one at a time.
- Choose JPEG, and decide about the private bitsJPEG is the format that opens everywhere, which is usually why you are here. Under Options, Keep EXIF and GPS decides whether the photo still says where and when it was taken.
- Press ExportEach card shows what the file will weigh before you commit. If a JPEG comes out larger than you want, set a file size to hit rather than guessing at the quality slider.
Both formats are lossy, so this is a second generation
A HEIC off an iPhone has already been through a lossy encoder once. Turning it into a JPEG means decoding those pixels and compressing them again with a different one, so some detail goes that you cannot get back. That is unavoidable in any tool, and worth knowing rather than glossing over. What this app does about it is show you the real result before you commit: the size on every card is a genuine encode of that file at those settings, not a formula, so you can move the quality slider and watch the actual number rather than guessing. The JPEG itself is written by mozjpeg rather than by the encoder built into macOS, which generally reaches the same visual quality in fewer bytes.
Why not just use a converter website?
Most converter sites cap you at a handful of files or a few megabytes each, and modern phone photos hit that quickly, so a camera roll turns into an afternoon of batches. A folder of two hundred goes through here in one pass, with nothing to wait for and nothing to count.
The photos themselves are the other half of it. A camera roll is the least suitable thing to upload to a stranger: holiday photos, photos of your kids, screenshots of things you did not think about before dragging them in. The location is usually still attached, which means the upload tells the site where you live before you have decided whether to strip it.
Questions
Why does my iPhone save HEIC instead of JPEG?
Because it is roughly half the size for the same picture. The trouble starts when you send one to somebody on an older device or upload it to a site that has never heard of it, which is when converting to JPEG stops being optional.
Does converting remove the location from my photos?
It does if you turn Keep EXIF and GPS off, which takes out the coordinates, the camera model and the timestamps. macOS insists on writing a small block with the colour space and the pixel dimensions, so it is not the same as a file with no metadata at all, but nothing in it says where you were.
Will the photos look worse?
Slightly, at the pixel level, because you are compressing an already compressed picture. At the default quality you are very unlikely to see it. Every card shows the resulting size before you export, so you can raise the quality if you would rather trade bytes for it.
Can I keep the original date on the file?
Leave Keep EXIF and GPS on and the capture date travels with the photo, which is what you want if the files are going into a library that sorts by it. Turn it off only when the photos are going to somebody else.
Other things it does
There is a full list on the Images by Edmund product page, along with what else the app does.
Get Images by Edmund.
Free, and it does the other eight jobs too. Two ways to get it when it lands: the Mac App Store, or straight from here.
macOS 15 or later. Apple silicon Mac. Version 1.1.0, out 11 October 2026. What’s new.