Is HEIC better quality than JPEG?

At the same file size, yes, and noticeably so. At the same quality, HEIC is roughly half the size. Its advantage is efficiency: it spends fewer bits to store the same image, and it can store things JPEG cannot, like 10-bit color and depth maps.

Can Windows and Android open HEIC files?

Partially. Windows needs the HEVC Video Extensions from the Microsoft Store (the codec license is the reason it is not built in), and Android support varies by device and app. For anything you share outside the Apple ecosystem, converting to JPG remains the reliable path.

Does converting HEIC to JPG lose quality?

Slightly. It is a re-encode from one lossy format to another, and JPEG also drops HEIC's 10-bit color down to 8-bit. At a high JPEG quality setting (90% or above) the visible difference is negligible for typical photos.

How do I make my iPhone shoot JPG instead of HEIC?

Go to Settings > Camera > Formats and choose Most Compatible. Your photos will be JPEGs, at the cost of roughly double the storage. High Efficiency (HEIC) is the default because of that storage saving.

Formats · July 2026 · 6 min read

Why Apple Uses HEIC Instead of JPG

Since 2017, every iPhone has saved photos in a format most of the world's software can't open by default. Apple had good reasons for the switch, and they say a lot about where image formats are heading.

What HEIC actually is

HEIC is two technologies working together. The container is HEIF (High Efficiency Image File Format), built on the same ISO base media structure as MP4 video files. The compression inside it is HEVC (H.265), the video codec Apple was already shipping in hardware for 4K video. You can think of a HEIC photo as a single video keyframe wrapped in an MP4-style box.

JPEG dates to 1992. It slices an image into blocks of 8x8 pixels, transforms each block independently, and compresses the result with Huffman coding. It was excellent for its era and its ubiquity is still unmatched, but it predates thirty years of compression research.

Half the size, same quality

The main reason is compression efficiency. HEVC spends its bits more intelligently than JPEG in three ways.

It predicts before it compresses. JPEG compresses every 8x8 block from scratch, while HEVC first predicts each block from its already-decoded neighbors using 35 different directional modes, then stores only the difference. Smooth skies and repeating textures nearly vanish from the file.
Its block sizes flex with the content. Instead of a fixed 8x8 grid, HEVC divides the image into blocks from 64x64 down to 4x4, spending detail only where the image has detail.
Its entropy coder is a generation newer. HEVC's arithmetic coder (CABAC) squeezes the final bits harder than the Huffman codes JPEG inherited from the 1950s.

In practice this adds up to files that are 40 to 50% smaller at the same visual quality. For Apple, that halved the effective cost of every photo on a 64 GB phone and every photo synced through iCloud. At iPhone scale, the saving is enormous.

The features JPEG never had

Size was only half the argument. The camera Apple wanted to build needed abilities that JPEG structurally lacks.

10-bit color. JPEG stores 8 bits per channel, about 16.7 million colors. HEIC stores 10, which is over a billion. That headroom is what lets Smart HDR render skies and shadows without visible banding.
Depth maps. Portrait mode stores the depth data alongside the photo as an auxiliary image in the same file, which is why you can change the background blur after taking the shot.
Multiple images per file. The HEIF container holds image sequences, so bursts, Live Photos, and exposure brackets travel as one item instead of a folder of JPEGs.
Alpha channels and embedded thumbnails, both supported by the container directly rather than through bolted-on conventions.

The hardware angle

The usual objection to modern codecs is that they cost far more CPU to encode than JPEG. Apple sidestepped this completely. Every iPhone since the A9 chip has a dedicated HEVC encoder in silicon, so encoding a HEIC photo costs effectively nothing in time or battery; it never touches the CPU. When you control the chip, the camera, the OS, and the cloud storage bill, the 1992 format's simplicity buys you nothing.

So why didn't the web follow?

The short answer is patents. HEVC is covered by thousands of them, administered by multiple competing license pools, with terms that made browser vendors walk away. No major browser ever shipped HEIC support, and none plan to. Apple can absorb the licensing because it ships hardware; an open web platform can't.

That licensing failure is why the industry formed the Alliance for Open Media and built AVIF, a royalty-free format with the same core ideas and a newer codec inside. HEIC proved that video-codec compression belongs in photos. AVIF made the idea shippable everywhere.

What this means day to day

Inside the Apple ecosystem, HEIC is invisible. Everything just works and takes half the space. The friction appears the moment a HEIC file leaves: an upload form that rejects it, a Windows machine that won't preview it, a printer portal from 2011. iOS quietly converts to JPEG in many share paths, but files transferred by cable, cloud drive, or email attachment arrive as HEIC.

Try it HEIC to JPG Converter Convert iPhone photos in your browser. Nothing is uploaded. →

If you regularly need compatibility, the phone-side fix is Settings > Camera > Formats > Most Compatible, which trades storage for JPEGs at capture time.