Batch
Convert a folder of HEIC photos
Nobody chose HEIC. An iPhone produced it, and now a thousand holiday photographs will not open on a work laptop, will not attach to a claim form and will not upload to a printing service. This converts the folder, not the photo.
HEIC is the format problem that reached ordinary people. It is a perfectly good container that most phones now write by default, and much of the rest of computing — older laptops, claim portals, print shops, plenty of workplace software — simply does not read it. The result is a recurring, low-grade emergency involving a folder of photographs that exist and cannot be opened.
The usual fix is a converter site that takes twenty at a time, which is the wrong unit: the folder is a thousand. That limit is not modesty about what the software can do, it is the cost of receiving a thousand photographs, and it is precisely the cost that does not arise when the conversion happens in the browser.
There is a privacy consequence worth naming, because photographs are unusually revealing. Each one records when it was taken and usually where — a year of family photographs is a map of where a family lives and goes. Converting them here means that folder is never handed to anyone, and the metadata tools let you check what came across.
Start here
- Open the batch runnerChoose the folder of photos, pick the conversion, and run it across all of them at once.
- HEIC to JPGThe single-photo version, and the right choice when you want the smaller, universally accepted format.
- HEIC to PNGLossless instead, for a photo that will be edited again rather than filed.
- Check what the photo carriesA phone photograph records where and when it was taken. Worth reading before a folder of them goes anywhere.
What this will not do
Worth reading before you put a client’s file through it.
- — JPG is lossy. Converting re-encodes the picture, so a photo converted repeatedly degrades — convert from the original each time.
- — Live Photos become a single still. The motion is not in the converted file.
- — Editing done in the iPhone Photos app is sometimes stored separately from the image. Export from Photos rather than copying the raw file if an edit must survive.
- — A very large folder is bounded by your browser’s memory, since the decoding happens in the tab. The page says so rather than refusing.
Check it rather than trust it
Turn off your wifi and use any tool here. If the work still happens, the file is not going anywhere — that is a proof you can perform in three seconds, and it beats anything we could write. The longer version, with the protocol and the result, is on the proof page.
Everything here is free, MIT-licensed and has no account, quota or watermark. It is maintained by one person, unpaid. If it saves you an afternoon, you can support the work.