How to convert a HEIC photo to JPG on Mac

You AirDropped a photo from your iPhone and now you’re staring at a .heic file that won’t open in your design tool, won’t upload to your CMS, and looks like a broken thumbnail in half your apps. HEIC is a great format for storage, but compatibility is still patchy outside Apple’s ecosystem.

Two paths

Native macOS. You actually have a few options here:

• Preview’s Export. Open the HEIC in Preview, then File → Export, choose JPEG from the format dropdown, set quality, and save. Works fine for a single image; tedious for twenty.

• Photos app. Drag a photo out of Photos while holding Option and macOS exports it as JPEG by default. Quick when the photo already lives in your library.

• Terminal with sips. The fastest scripted option:

  sips -s format jpeg input.heic --out output.jpg
  

  Loop it over a folder with for f in *.heic; do sips -s format jpeg "$f" --out "${f%.heic}.jpg"; done. Powerful, but it doesn’t strip the embedded HEIC depth/depth-effect metadata or let you tweak quality interactively.

Melt. Drag any number of HEIC files in, set the output format to JPEG, hit Compress. It does the conversion plus optional re-compression in one pass, and strips EXIF if you want (handy if you’re posting photos online and don’t want to leak GPS coordinates).

Convert HEIC to JPG in Melt

1. Open Melt.
2. Drag your HEIC files into the window — single image or a whole folder.
3. Set the output format to JPEG.
4. Pick a quality (85 is a good default for photos).
5. Click Compress.

Honest tradeoffs

HEIC compresses much better than JPEG at the same visual quality — converting throws that efficiency away. A 2 MB HEIC often becomes a 3–4 MB JPEG at quality 90. If you only need JPEG for one specific recipient or upload, convert that one copy and keep your originals in HEIC. If your whole workflow chokes on HEIC, batch-converting an Export folder is the saner move.