Compress HEIC Photos — Free & Private

HEIC (High Efficiency Image Container) is Apple's photo format used by default on iPhone and iPad. While HEIC already achieves excellent compression compared to older formats, the photos from a modern iPhone camera are still 3–8 MB each — which adds up quickly when sharing, uploading, or publishing collections of photos.

Since browsers cannot re-encode to HEIC format (there is no HEIC encoder in web browsers), "compressing" HEIC photos in a browser context means converting them to JPEG at a quality setting that provides an excellent balance of size and visual quality. The result is a widely compatible JPEG that is 30–60% smaller than the original HEIC for most content.

At quality 82–85, iPhone photos converted from HEIC to JPEG are essentially indistinguishable from the original on screen. The visual quality is excellent for sharing, social media, blog publication, client delivery, and any screen-based use. For print, use quality 90+ to preserve fine detail.

The compression is most dramatic for high-resolution iPhone photos. A 12 MP shot from an iPhone might be 5 MB as HEIC; converted to JPEG at quality 85, it becomes 1.5–2.5 MB — a 50–70% reduction. For web publishing, this is a massive bandwidth saving with no visible quality trade-off.

An important note: HEIC photos sometimes contain HDR (High Dynamic Range) data, depth maps from Portrait mode, and Live Photo metadata. These are not represented in JPEG format. The conversion produces the standard still photo layer, which is what you see when you view the photo normally.