HEIC vs JPG on Mac — which should you use?

You took a photo on your iPhone, AirDropped it to your Mac, and now it’s a .heic file that some apps love and others completely refuse to open. Meanwhile your old camera spits out .jpg and works literally everywhere. So which one should you actually be using?

What HEIC is

HEIC (High Efficiency Image Container) is Apple’s wrapper around HEIF, which uses HEVC video compression for still images. The headline trick: it stores roughly the same visual quality as JPEG in about half the file size. It also supports 16-bit colour, transparency, live photos, and depth data — all things JPEG can’t do.

What JPG is

JPEG has been the default web photo format since 1992. Every browser, every CMS, every printer, every email client opens it without complaint. It’s lossy, it’s 8-bit, it doesn’t do transparency, and it’s roughly twice the size of HEIC for the same look — but it’s universal.

When to use HEIC

• Storing iPhone photos in your own library — saves a lot of disk space.
• Sharing within the Apple ecosystem (iMessage, AirDrop to other Macs, iCloud Photos).
• Anything where the depth or live-photo metadata matters.

When to use JPG

• Uploading to anything that isn’t built by Apple — most CMSes, older web tools, Windows machines, printers.
• Sending a photo to someone who might be on Android, Linux, or Windows.
• Embedding in PDFs, slide decks, or design files that need broad compatibility.

How to switch your iPhone to capture JPG

Settings → Camera → Formats → Most Compatible. From that moment on your phone shoots JPEG. You lose the storage win, but every photo just works.

Converting HEIC to JPG on Mac

Preview. Open the HEIC, File → Export, choose JPEG, save. Fine for one image.

sips in Terminal. Faster for batches:

sips -s format jpeg photo.heic --out photo.jpg

Loop over a folder with for f in *.heic; do sips -s format jpeg "$f" --out "${f%.heic}.jpg"; done.

Melt. Drag a folder of HEICs in, set output to JPEG, click Compress. Handles dozens at once and strips EXIF if you want it cleaned for sharing. Download Melt if you do this often.

What you lose, what you keep

Converting HEIC to JPG roughly doubles the file size at matched quality and drops you from 16-bit to 8-bit colour. You also lose any depth/portrait metadata. For most sharing-and-uploading purposes none of that matters; for archival photography it does. Keep your originals in HEIC and convert copies for the world.