Is heictojpg.com
safe?
It is a real product, from a real named company, with published terms and a published deletion window. It also uploads your photos and asks you to accept unusually broad content terms you were never shown. Here is the whole thing, quoted and sourced.
The answer, first
It depends on what's in the photo. heictojpg.com is a genuine product from Beamr Imaging Ltd. that uploads your photos to its servers, promises to delete them within 48 hours, and asks you to grant it unusually broad rights over your content in terms the page never puts in front of you.
We make a converter that competes with theirs, so weigh this page accordingly. Every fact below is quoted verbatim and linked to the document it came from, and our own shortcomings are listed further down. Don't take our word for any of it — read their terms yourself, they're one click away.
Who is behind it
heictojpg.com is operated by Beamr Imaging Ltd. Its Terms of Use
open by introducing the company as
Beamr Imaging Ltd. ("Beamr", "us", "we" or "our"). That is worth
noting in its favour: plenty of free converters never tell you which company you
are handing a file to, and this one does, in writing, in the document that governs
the arrangement.
The homepage is equally direct about what it offers:
"Convert HEIC to JPG Instantly – Free, High-Quality, Up to 200 Photos"
Two hundred photos, free, no fuss. That is a real offer and it explains why the site is where most people land. If you have two hundred holiday snaps and no particular feelings about where they go, it does the job it says it does.
What it does well
A page that only listed the bad parts would be doing exactly the thing this site exists to complain about. So, plainly:
- It names its operator. Beamr Imaging Ltd. is identified in the terms. You know who has your file.
- It publishes a retention window. Not every converter commits to one in writing. This one does, and puts a number on it.
- The terms are public. They're linked from the site and readable by anyone, which is the only reason this page can quote them.
- Server-side conversion is a legitimate architecture. It is how most converters work, it's often the only way to support unusual formats, and there is nothing improper about choosing it.
The clause nobody reads
Here is the part of the Terms of Use that gets quoted, verbatim and without trimming:
"Beamr hereby is and shall be granted a nonexclusive, worldwide, royalty free, perpetual, irrevocable, sub licensable and transferable right to use, process, store, copy, reproduce, reformat, translate, modify and create derivative works of your Content"
And here, from the same document, is what it promises about deletion:
"Your content will be removed from Beamr's systems within 48 hours from the time your Content was uploaded to the Service."
The terms spell the timing out twice, in case the first pass was ambiguous:
"your original photos/ videos are removed from our Service 48 hours after they were optimized, while your converted and optimized photos/ videos are normally removed 48 hours after they were created."
The same document also says content may be used
internally for improving the Service.
Reading that clause fairly
It would be easy, and dishonest, to stop at the first quote and let you conclude the worst. So here is the argument against our own headline.
What the clause plausibly is. To convert a file on a server, a company technically has to copy it, store it, reformat it and produce a modified version of it — that modified version is, in legal terms, a derivative work. It's your JPG. Lawyers draft these clauses wide so that every step of the ordinary job is unambiguously permitted, and words like worldwide and sub licensable often mean nothing more exotic than "we use a CDN and a cloud provider in more than one country". Clauses of this shape are boilerplate of a kind that appears in many services' terms.
What it says on its face. Considerably more than that. Perpetual and irrevocable do not expire in 48 hours. Transferable survives a change of ownership. Nothing in the wording limits the granted rights to the job you asked for. The 48-hour deletion promise and the perpetual grant live in the same document and are not obviously reconciled by it.
Both of those are true at once. The honest criticism is not that Beamr steals photos — there is no evidence of that, and we are not implying it. The criticism is narrower and, we think, harder to argue with: the terms are broad, and you agreed to them without ever being shown them. You dragged a photo onto a page and a legal arrangement happened. Whether that arrangement is fine depends entirely on what was in the photo — and nobody asked you that question at the moment it mattered.
Our bias, and our own downsides
We make a competing converter. It runs in your browser and never uploads anything, which is the whole reason we have opinions about upload terms. That is a conflict of interest and you should read this page knowing it.
So here is our own list, the one a fair competitor would want you to see:
- Our JPGs are bigger than your HEICs — around 168%. Every HEIC-to-JPG converter does this, theirs included. It is physics, not a defect.
- We drop EXIF metadata — dates, camera, GPS. Rotation is applied, so photos come out the right way up, but if you need the timestamp preserved, we are not your tool yet.
- We only do JPG, PNG, WebP and PDF. No video, no exotic formats, no OCR. If you need one of those, a cloud converter is genuinely the better answer.
- Very large zips are limited by your browser's memory. The app warns you before you hit it, but a phone is still a phone.
- A decoder downloads once — about 1.4 MB, on first use. A network request; just not one with your photo in it.
- We are a small independent project, not an audited company with a compliance department, and Beamr is an established business.
Which is exactly why we'd rather you checked than believed us.
Convert without the terms of service
Free, no account, no daily cap, no file limit. Then run the checks below on us — they work on any converter, and ours is the one we'd most like you to test.
How to check all of this yourself
None of this needs to be taken on trust, including the parts about us.
- Read the terms. They're at heictojpg.com/tou.html. Search the page for "derivative" and for "48 hours" and you will land on both quotes above, in their original context. If we have characterised them unfairly, you will be able to tell in about a minute.
-
Watch the wire. Press
F12, open the Network tab, and convert a photo on any converter. An uploader shows a request carrying megabytes. A local one shows nothing. This is your browser reporting on the page, so the page can't lie to you. - Pull the plug. Turn off Wi-Fi and convert anyway. An uploader stops dead. Ours keeps going, because after the page loads there is nothing left for it to talk to. The full version of that test is ten seconds long.
Questions people actually ask
- Is heictojpg.com a virus, or otherwise dishonest?
- No. There is no evidence of that, and we are not suggesting it. It is a real product from a real, named company that publishes its terms and states a deletion window — which is more than many free tools manage. The question worth asking is a different one: do you want the photo you're about to convert sitting on someone else's machine for up to 48 hours, under terms you haven't read?
- Who operates heictojpg.com?
-
Beamr Imaging Ltd., named in the first line of its Terms of Use as
Beamr Imaging Ltd. ("Beamr", "us", "we" or "our"). - Does it upload my photos?
- Yes — it's a server-side converter, like most of them. Its own terms describe content being uploaded to the Service and later removed from Beamr's systems, which only makes sense if the file travels. The Network tab will show you the request.
- How long do they keep my photos?
- The terms say within 48 hours of upload, and repeat the point for originals and converted copies separately. That's a written promise. It is also, from outside, unverifiable — which is true of every retention promise, everywhere, including ones made in good faith.
- So should I use it or not?
- For photos you'd be relaxed about posting publicly, it's a capable free tool and the terms are unlikely to matter to you. For a passport, a medical form, a whiteboard or your kids, we'd convert on your own device — with our tool or anyone else's — because then the question of what a server does with the file never comes up. That's the only argument we're making.
Keep reading
- Alternatives to heictojpg.com — the honest roundup, including the ones that aren't us.
- Is CloudConvert safe? — a cloud converter with notably strong stated practices.
- Converting without uploading — and the ten-second test that settles it.