HEIC to JPG,
without uploading anything.
Almost every "free online HEIC converter" is a web form in front of a server: your photos get sent to a company, converted there, and stored for a while. It doesn't have to work that way, and you can prove which kind you're using in about ten seconds.
The short version
Your browser can do this itself. It has been able to since about 2018, when WebAssembly shipped everywhere — that's a way to run real, compiled C code at close to native speed inside a tab. The standard open-source HEIC decoder, libheif, compiles to WebAssembly. So a converter can download the decoder once and then do every conversion on your own machine, with your photos never touching the network.
That's what this converter does. It is not a claim you have to take on faith, which is the entire point of the rest of this page.
Convert HEIC to JPG right now, without uploading
Free, no account, no daily cap, no file limit. Then come back and check it with the test below — it takes ten seconds and it's the only thing that counts.
Why "we delete your files after an hour" isn't the reassurance it sounds like
Server-side conversion is a legitimate way to build software. It is how most converters work, it is often the only way to support exotic formats, and the companies doing it are not villains. But it does mean a copy of your photo sat on a machine you don't control, and you are being asked to trust a promise about what happened to it there.
Sometimes that promise is generous. Sometimes it isn't, and the only way to find
out is to read the terms of service — which nobody does. Here is the one attached
to heictojpg.com, the first result most people click:
"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"
The same document also says your content is removed within 48 hours of upload, so the picture is more nuanced than the quote alone suggests — and we've written the full, fair version of that story separately. The point here is narrower: those are the terms you accepted when you dragged a photo of your passport onto that page, and you accepted them without reading them, because the page never asked you to.
None of this is an argument that uploading is evil. It's an argument that it should be a choice you make knowingly. For holiday snaps, who cares. For a photo of a document, a whiteboard, a medical form, or your kids, you might care quite a lot — and right now most people making that trade don't know they're making it.
How to check any converter in ten seconds
You don't need to trust this page, or any page. Both of these tests work on any converter you like, including this one, and neither needs any technical knowledge.
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Test one: pull the plug
Load the converter. Now turn off your Wi-Fi, or switch on airplane mode. Then convert a photo.
A converter that works on your device carries on exactly as before — there was never anything on the other end of the wire. A converter that uploads stops dead, usually with an error about the network. This test cannot be faked: you have physically removed the network, so there is no upload that could be happening quietly.
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Test two: watch the wire
Press
F12to open your browser's developer tools and click the Network tab. Leave it open and convert a photo.An uploader shows you a request — usually a
POST— carrying megabytes of data, and you can watch the size tick up as your photo goes out. A local converter shows nothing at all: no upload, no download, not even an analytics ping. This is your browser reporting on the page, not the page reporting on itself, so a page cannot lie to you here. -
Then do the actual job
Drag your HEICs onto the page, paste them, or pick a folder. On this converter there's no file limit and no daily cap, because there's no server whose bill grows with your batch — a few hundred photos at once is normal.
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Save, and reconnect whenever
Download the JPGs one by one or as a single zip. You can turn your connection back on at any point; the work already happened.
The honest caveats
A page that only listed advantages would be doing the same thing it's complaining about. So:
- You do download a decoder. About 1.4 MB, once, the first time you convert something. That's a network request — just not one containing your photo. After it lands, the page needs nothing else.
- Your JPGs will be bigger than your HEICs. Typically around 168%. That's true of every HEIC-to-JPG converter, uploading or not: HEVC (inside the HEIC) is a 2013 codec, JPG's compression is from 1992. You're paying in megabytes for a file that opens everywhere.
- Very large batches are limited by your device, not by a plan. That's usually far more generous than a free tier, but a phone with 3 GB of RAM is still a phone with 3 GB of RAM.
- EXIF metadata is dropped — dates, camera model, GPS. The photo is decoded to pixels and re-encoded, and the metadata doesn't survive the trip. Rotation is applied, so photos come out the right way up. If you need the location and timestamp preserved, this tool isn't the one for that job yet.
Questions people actually ask
- Can you really convert HEIC to JPG without uploading?
- Yes. The browser decodes and re-encodes the image itself using WebAssembly. The proof is that it works offline — see the airplane-mode test above.
- Is a local converter slower than an online one?
- Usually it's faster. The slow part of an online converter isn't the conversion, it's uploading your photos and downloading them back again. Skipping both wins easily, especially on a batch.
- Do I have to install anything?
- No. No install, no account, no admin rights — which matters on a work laptop where you can't install software. A desktop app keeps your files local too, but that's a bigger commitment for a one-off job.
- Does it work on iPhone, iPad, Android and Windows?
- Yes, in any browser from the last few years. On an iPhone or iPad it's especially quick, because Safari can decode HEIC natively and the converter uses the system decoder instead of the WebAssembly one.
- What about photos I've already run through an uploading converter?
- They were uploaded; that can't be undone. What you can do is read the terms of the service you used, and check whether it offers a deletion request. Going forward, the airplane-mode test tells you which kind of tool you're about to use before you hand it anything.
Keep reading
- Batch converting hundreds of HEICs at once — and why there's no daily cap here.
- Is heictojpg.com safe? — the fair, sourced answer.
- Why Windows won't open your HEIC files — the patent story, and four fixes.
Ready when you are
Drop in a few hundred iPhone photos. Nothing uploads, nothing is capped, and the wire tap on the front page counts the bytes leaving — live, while you work.