HEIC vs JPG: Quality, File Size, and When to Use Each
I’ve read a lot of forum posts claiming HEIC is “way better” than JPG, and about as many insisting that converting to JPG “ruins your photos”. Neither camp is right. Both formats make trade-offs. Which one you want depends entirely on what happens to the photo next.
The file size difference is real
HEIC files come out roughly 40-50% smaller than the equivalent JPG, and they do it consistently rather than on a good day. Take a standard 12-megapixel iPhone photo at default settings:
| Format | Size | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| HEIC (default) | ~1.8 MB | Excellent quality |
| JPG at quality 92 | ~3.5 MB | Matches HEIC visually |
| JPG at quality 80 | ~1.9 MB | Same size, but artefacts start showing |
To get a JPG down to HEIC’s file size you have to drop the quality to around 80, and at that setting compression artefacts start to show: blocky patches in gradients, smeared detail around sharp edges. HEIC reaches the same size without the visual penalty, because HEVC compression is a good deal more efficient than JPEG’s DCT approach.
Quality: honestly hard to tell apart
Put a well-exposed HEIC photo next to the same image converted to JPG at quality 92 and try to spot the difference. On a phone screen you can’t. On a 27-inch monitor you’d have to zoom to 200% and squint. At any normal viewing distance they are the same photograph.
The gap only opens at the extremes. Crank the quality right down for tiny files and HEIC goes soft and a little blurry, which is the kind of degradation people forgive without noticing. JPG turns ugly instead, throwing blocky artefacts around text and hard edges. So if you genuinely need aggressively small files, HEIC holds up better.
The colour depth thing
HEIC handles 16-bit colour — over 281 trillion possible values — where JPG caps out at 8-bit and 16.7 million. The gap sounds enormous. In practice you’ll see it in two places: skies and sunsets with very gradual gradients, and serious colour grading where you need headroom to push things around without banding. For social media, 4x6 prints or sending photos to your mother, it’s academic.
What HEIC can do that JPG can’t
Forget compression for a second. HEIC is a container, so a single file can hold transparency, the video clip behind a Live Photo, a depth map from Portrait Mode, a whole burst of frames, and metadata that JPEG has no room for. JPEG was never designed for any of that. I’ve written up the full list of HEIC’s container features separately.
When to stick with JPEG
Ubiquity is JPEG’s real advantage, and it isn’t a small one. Every device built in the last thirty years opens a JPEG without being asked twice, and no other format is close.
Convert to JPEG whenever the photo is leaving your hands. That covers sharing with anyone who isn’t on Apple hardware, uploading to a website or a form, attaching to an email, sending files to a print service, and feeding anything that doesn’t explicitly say it reads HEIC.
When to keep HEIC
Keep the originals as HEIC on the phone, where halving the storage is worth having, and anywhere you’re staying inside the Apple ecosystem. Live Photos and Portrait Mode need the container, so shooting either one settles the question for you. Archive copies should stay HEIC too. They’re the best version of the photo you own.
The practical approach
Don’t overthink this. Shoot HEIC on the phone. Convert to JPG when a photo has to leave the Apple world. At quality 92 the conversion is visually lossless and the result works everywhere.
heic.site converts in your browser. Nothing is uploaded, and there’s no quality loss beyond the setting you pick. Set it to 92 and stop thinking about it. If you have a whole folder to get through, the batch conversion guide covers that, and if you’re on Windows and can’t open the files in the first place, start with how to open HEIC on Windows.