HEIC vs JPEG

The short version: HEIC wins on technology, JPEG wins on compatibility. HEIC stores the same photo in about half the space with more color depth; JPEG opens on every device made in the last thirty years. Which one you want depends entirely on where the photo is going.

The size difference, measured

Apple's claim of "up to 50% smaller" holds up in practice. A 12-megapixel iPhone photo lands around 1.5 to 2.5 MB as HEIC; the same photo converted to JPG at 90% quality comes out between 3 and 5 MB. The gap comes from a quarter century of codec progress: HEVC intra-frame coding predicts each block of pixels from its neighbors, while JPEG, standardized in 1992, compresses each block independently.

Quality: a tie at capture, HEIC ahead at the edges

At normal viewing sizes, photos captured as HEIC and JPEG are indistinguishable. HEIC pulls ahead in edge cases: it supports 10-bit and higher color depth, so smooth sky gradients band less, and it carries the HDR data recent iPhones capture. JPEG is limited to 8-bit color. None of this repairs anything at conversion time, though: converting HEIC to JPEG keeps the photo as it looks and drops the extended headroom.

Compatibility: not close

JPEG opens everywhere without exception. HEIC opens on Apple devices, recent Android versions, and Windows only after installing Microsoft's paid HEVC extension. Among browsers, only Safari renders HEIC (caniuse.com). The blocker is legal rather than technical: HEVC decoding requires patent licenses that browser vendors have declined to pay, which is why the free, royalty-free JPEG remains the web's lingua franca.

Practical recommendation

Keep shooting HEIC; storage efficiency and HDR are worth it, and your iPhone shares JPEG automatically in most contexts. Convert deliberately when a file leaves the ecosystem: HEIC to JPG for anything you upload or send, and read our HEIC explainer if you want the full background on the format itself.