HEIC vs JPG

At a glance

HEIC is roughly half the size at matched visual quality, supports 10-bit colour, transparency and depth, and is readable mainly on Apple hardware. JPG is thirty years old, opens everywhere, and degrades visibly if you re-save it repeatedly. Neither is better in the abstract — the answer depends on where the file has to go.

File size is not a detail

The last row is the interesting one. On flat graphics with large areas of solid colour, HEIC’s advantage shrinks to nothing, because there is very little for a predictive codec to predict. If your library is mostly screenshots and diagrams, format choice barely moves the needle.

What "quality" actually means here

Two different questions hide inside the word quality, and mixing them up is where most online comparisons go wrong.

At the same file size, HEIC looks better — fewer blocking artefacts, smoother gradients, less banding in skies. At the same visual quality, HEIC is smaller. Both statements are true simultaneously; they compare different axes.

The practical consequence: JPEG at a high setting is still excellent, and remains the safer master format for print workflows that expect it. A print shop that asks for "300 dpi JPG" does not want a HEIC renamed.

Repeated editing is where JPEG shows its age

Every JPEG save re-compresses the image and throws away a little more detail — generation loss. Five open-and-save cycles on the same file produce visible softening and mosquito noise around high-contrast edges.

HEIC has the same fundamental problem, but Apple’s container stores non-destructive edits as instructions, so rotating or cropping a photo in Photos does not re-encode the pixels. That is why a HEIC library survives years of casual editing better than a JPEG one.

Compatibility is the whole argument

JPG opens in every browser, phone, printer, form and office suite made since the mid-1990s. HEIC opens on Apple devices, on recent Android phones, and on Windows only after the user installs two extra packages.

This is not a technicality — it is the entire reason this site exists. When a file has to work somewhere you do not control, the smaller file is worth nothing if the recipient cannot open it.

• Government and visa portals: JPG or PDF, almost never HEIC
• Word, PowerPoint, Outlook on Windows: JPG works, HEIC often does not
• Print shops: JPG or TIFF, occasionally PNG
• WordPress and most CMS upload filters: JPG, PNG, sometimes WebP
• Social platforms: accept both, but re-encode anyway

Metadata, depth and HDR

Both formats carry EXIF, so both can leak GPS coordinates. HEIC additionally stores depth maps, HDR gain maps and, for Live Photos, a video track.

Converting HEIC to JPG through a canvas strips all of it — the depth map, the gain map, the GPS tag and the capture date. For a file headed to a marketplace listing that is a feature. For an archive it is data loss. The metadata guide walks through what is removed and how to check.

Decoding cost, which nobody mentions

HEVC is more expensive to decode than JPEG. On a modern phone the difference is imperceptible; on an older laptop converting a folder of 200 HEIC files, it is the difference between a few seconds and most of a minute.

This is also why browser-based conversion needs a Web Worker: if decoding ran on the main thread, the page would freeze mid-batch and look broken.

The workflow that avoids the trade-off entirely

This is what most iPhone users actually need. Converting the whole library doubles storage, destroys the depth data and gains nothing, because the files that never leave the phone never needed to be JPG.

1. Shoot HEIC. Keep the space savings and the depth data.
2. Keep the originals. They are the master copy; JPGs are derivatives.
3. Convert only the files you need to send, upload or print.
4. Batch it when there are many — bulk HEIC to JPG takes 100 files at a time and returns a ZIP.