iOS gives you three ways to do this without installing anything. They are worth knowing, and they run out at exactly the point where most people give up and paste their photo into a website.
FormatFox converts HEIC to JPG for free, on the phone, with nothing uploaded.
Select the photo, tap Share, choose Copy Photo, then open the Files app and paste into a folder. What lands is a JPG. This is the fastest single photo route on iOS and it costs nothing.
Attaching a photo to a mail and downloading it back gives you a JPG too. It needs a configured mail account and a working connection, and it puts a copy of your photo on a mail server on the way through, which matters if the photo is a document.
Settings, then Camera, then Formats, then Most Compatible. From then on the camera writes JPG. This solves tomorrow and does nothing at all for the four hundred HEIC files already in your library, and it gives up the space saving on every future photo.
Where all three stop. None of them converts a folder of photos in one action, none of them tells you how large the result is, and the two that work today are one file at a time. That is the gap a converter is for.
Converting one photo is free and is not counted or metered. Converting a whole selection in one pass is the Pro unlock, a single payment with a base price of 4.99 EUR.
Both are offered. They are not interchangeable, and picking the wrong one is how a 3 MB photo turns into a 20 MB one. JPG and JPEG are the same format under two spellings, so a form asking for JPEG will take the JPG file FormatFox writes.
| Target | Pick it when | Watch out for |
|---|---|---|
| JPG | Photographs, scans of documents, anything a form or a print shop will read | Lossy, so repeated re saving slowly degrades the image |
| PNG | Screenshots, drawings, flat colour, anything with sharp text edges | Lossless, so a photograph saved as PNG can be several times larger than the HEIC it came from |
| HEIC | Going the other way, when you want a JPG library to take up less room on the phone | Windows and older software may refuse to open it, which is the problem you started with |
The HEIC files people convert are rarely holiday snaps. They are a passport page, a driving licence, a payslip, a signed form. A browser converter has to receive that picture on a machine you do not control before it can hand you a JPG.
FormatFox decodes and re encodes with the image library already on your iPhone. There is no request to make, which is why the conversion still completes with the phone in Airplane Mode. If you want the longer version, read converting files without uploading them.
Since iOS 11 the camera writes HEIC by default because it stores a comparable picture in roughly half the space. The trade is compatibility: plenty of upload forms, print shops and older Windows software still expect JPG and reject HEIC outright.
Yes. Copying a photo in Photos and pasting it into the Files app produces a JPG, mailing the photo to yourself produces a JPG, and switching Settings to Most Compatible makes the camera write JPG from then on. Each works, and each has a catch: the copy trick is one photo at a time, the mail trick needs a mail account and a network, and the settings change does nothing for the photos you already took.
A little, because both formats are lossy and the picture is decoded and re encoded once. FormatFox writes JPG at a high default quality, and Pro adds a slider if you want to trade more quality for a smaller file. Going the other way, JPG to HEIC, usually shrinks the file noticeably.
Only if you ask for it. FormatFox copies EXIF, GPS, TIFF and IPTC metadata into the output when Keep EXIF metadata is on, which is a Pro control. Left off, the converted JPG carries the picture and not the trail behind it.
FormatFox