Melt guide

Convert a folder of HEIC photos to JPG on Mac

You've got hundreds of HEIC files from your iPhone and need them all as JPG. Here's how to bulk convert on macOS.

4 min read

You imported a year of iPhone photos and now you’ve got 800 HEIC files that your photo editor refuses to open. Doing them one at a time in Preview is going to take an evening, and that’s an evening you’d rather not spend.

Why bulk matters

HEIC was designed for storage efficiency, not compatibility. When you need to feed photos to a tool that doesn’t speak it — old Adobe versions, Windows machines, certain CMSes — every file has to be re-encoded. The native tools all work, but they’re built around single-image flows.

The native way: sips in Terminal

sips ships with macOS and handles batch conversion in a one-liner. Open Terminal, cd to the folder, then:

for f in *.heic *.HEIC; do
  sips -s format jpeg "$f" --out "${f%.*}.jpg"
done

That converts every HEIC in the folder into a JPEG next to it. Add -s formatOptions 85 after jpeg to set quality. To put the JPEGs in a subfolder instead, prefix the output with jpg/.

For nested folders:

find . -iname "*.heic" -exec sh -c '
  sips -s format jpeg "$1" --out "${1%.*}.jpg"
' _ {} \;

The Photos app way

If your HEICs are already in the Photos library: select them all, File → Export → Export N Photos, set format to JPEG, choose quality, click Export. Slower than sips but easier if you live in Photos.

The faster way

Drag the entire folder into Melt, pick JPEG as the output, click Compress. It runs the whole batch in parallel, shows progress, and lets you set quality and resize in the same pass. Download Melt.

Bulk convert in Melt

  1. Open Melt.
  2. Drag the folder (or just the selected HEICs) in.
  3. Set output format to JPEG.
  4. Pick quality — 85 for sharing, 90+ for archiving.
  5. Optionally enable resize or strip metadata.
  6. Click Compress.

What you lose, what you keep

Converting 800 HEICs to JPEG will roughly double your disk usage at matched quality, and you drop from 16-bit to 8-bit colour. Filenames and capture dates are preserved by all three methods; the EXIF block is too unless you ask for it to be stripped. Keep the HEIC originals somewhere safe (external drive, Photos library) and treat the JPEG batch as a working copy.

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