Make your iPhone take JPG photos instead of HEIC
The setting
Open Settings › Camera › Formats. You see two options: High Efficiency (HEIC/HEVC) and Most Compatible (JPG/H.264). Select Most Compatible and every photo you take from then on is saved as JPG. Existing photos are not converted — the setting only affects new shots.
What switching to JPG costs you
Storage, mainly. JPG files are roughly 1.5–2× the size of the same photo as HEIC, so a 128 GB iPhone fills up noticeably faster. You also lose a few features that depend on the High Efficiency pipeline: 4K video at 60 fps requires HEVC, and on newer models certain HDR and cinematic features are only available in the high-efficiency formats. For most everyday photography, image quality itself is effectively the same.
The middle road: keep HEIC, share as JPG
Before flipping the switch, know that iOS already solves the compatibility problem in many places automatically:
- Settings › Photos › Transfer to Mac or PC › Automatic converts photos to JPG when you copy them to a computer over USB.
- Sharing via Mail and most messaging apps sends a JPG version, not the HEIC original.
- In any app, you can duplicate-and-edit a photo, and exports are commonly JPG.
With these defaults, many people never actually encounter a HEIC file outside their own phone — they keep the storage benefit and compatibility sorts itself out.
For the HEIC photos you already have
Changing the camera format does nothing for the thousands of HEIC photos already in your library. When one of those needs to be a JPG — for an upload form, an old laptop, a print service — convert it on the spot with our browser-based HEIC to JPG converter: no app to install, and the photo never leaves your device. For a batch, select up to 20 at once and download them as a single ZIP.
Recommendation
Switch to Most Compatible only if you constantly move photos into systems that reject HEIC (some business workflows, older Android family members, legacy software). Otherwise: keep High Efficiency, let iOS convert when sharing, and convert the occasional stubborn file in the browser.