Why iPhone photos won't open everywhere
Since iOS 11, an iPhone's Camera app saves photos as HEIC by default — a format built on more efficient image coding than JPEG, so the same photo takes up noticeably less space on the phone. That efficiency is a real win for storage. It's also the entire reason a HEIC photo often won't open outside Apple's own apps: most software, and most websites that accept a photo upload, were never built to decode it.
The usual workaround is to email or message the photo to yourself, which quietly converts it to JPEG along the way — an unofficial version of exactly what this tool does directly, without needing another app in the middle.
What actually happens during conversion
HEIC and JPEG encode a picture in genuinely different ways, so turning one into the other means fully
decoding the HEIC image into raw pixels and re-encoding those pixels in the target format. That
decoding runs through a WebAssembly build of libheif — the same open-source decoder every other
"no upload" browser-based HEIC converter is built on, since there is no way to read HEIC in a browser
without either a server call or that decoder running locally.
Nothing about the file is sent anywhere to make this work. The photo is read with the browser's own file API, decoded by that WebAssembly module inside this tab, and handed back to you as a download.
Choosing JPG or PNG
JPG is the right default for almost everyone — smaller, and readable by essentially every piece of software and every upload form that exists. The quality slider trades file size against detail; the default matches roughly what an iPhone's own JPG export uses.
PNG is lossless: no quality setting, because there's nothing to trade off. The output is pixel-for-pixel the same image the decoder produced, at the cost of a meaningfully larger file. Worth it for a screenshot-style image or anything with sharp edges and flat colour; usually overkill for an ordinary photo.
What this tool doesn't do
It converts the still photo — not a Live Photo's few seconds of motion, which iPhone stores as separate frames inside the same HEIC container. Export a Live Photo as a video from the share sheet first if the motion matters.
A side effect worth knowing about: the metadata doesn't come along
HEIC photos, like JPEGs, carry a block of metadata alongside the picture — camera make and model, the exact timestamp, and, if location services were on, the GPS coordinates of where the photo was taken. None of that is visible in the image itself.
Converting through this tool decodes the HEIC down to raw pixels and re-encodes those pixels fresh as a JPG or PNG. That process never reads or carries forward the original's separate metadata fields — it only ever touches the picture — so the file you download has none of what the HEIC had. It isn't a cleaning step bolted on; it's just what decoding and re-encoding a picture from scratch does. If you have other photos — JPEGs or PNGs that were never converted — that still carry this, our free EXIF remover shows you what's in them and strips it out, in the same browser tab.
A photo everything can open is more useful. A photo that isn't quietly carrying where you were is safer. This tool happens to hand you both from the same conversion. Neither one is what Vaultine does — Vaultine is where you lock files away, not where you convert them — but all of it exists for the same reason: your photos should behave the way you expect them to, on your terms.
