HEIC to JPG: what you lose, and the GPS you might not want to keep

The iPhone 11 Pro Max photo we tested knows it was taken 260.5 metres above sea level, by someone moving at half a kilometre an hour, with the camera pointing 348 degrees from magnetic north and the position good to within 38.8 metres. It also carries the date with its time zone, the lens (“back triple camera 4.25mm f/1.8”) and a unique ID for the shot. None of that is visible in the picture. All of it is in the HEIC file, and a converter that copies metadata across puts it in the JPG too.

We converted five public HEIC and HEIF photos with our HEIC to JPG and HEIC to PNG tools on 24 September 2026, in Chrome 153 on a Mac, then checked every output with exiftool 13.55 and compared the colours against Apple’s own conversion. Two photos came from iPhones (an 11 Pro Max and a 13 Pro Max), two from a Nokia 8.3 5G, and one is a small 1440 by 960 test image.

What rides along with an iPhone photo

exiftool lists 172 entries for the iPhone 11 Pro Max file and 190 for the iPhone 13 Pro Max one. Most are harmless camera settings. These are the ones worth knowing about, and what was left of them in our JPG copies.

The JPG copies have nothing but the bare JFIF header a JPG needs to open: exiftool finds no GPS, date, camera or ID tags in any of the 20 files we wrote (five photos, four formats each). You can check your own copy the same way with exiftool -a -G1 photo.jpg. The Nokia photos carried GPS as well, and lost it the same way.

That is a choice, and we think it is the right default for a converter. People convert HEIC because a Windows app, an upload form or a colleague can’t open it, which usually means the copy is about to leave the phone. If you want the date kept for your own albums, this is the wrong tool: write it down first, or convert on the phone. Our guide to EXIF and GPS covers the other photo formats.

File size: quality 90 grows, quality 75 shrinks

HEIC holds a photo in fewer bytes than JPG. How much fewer depends almost entirely on the quality you pick.

Every phone photo came out smaller as a quality 75 JPG than as the HEIC it started from, and 1.3 to 1.9 times bigger at quality 90. HEIC only saves space against a high-quality JPG. We’d pick 75 for anything you are sending or uploading, and 90 only when the photo is going to be printed or edited again. Our JPG quality measurements show where the losses start to show.

The small test image went the other way at every setting. It was saved as a heavily compressed HEIC to begin with, 50.7 KB for 1.4 megapixels, and no JPG setting we tried matched that.

PNG is the wrong format for phone photos.

It stores every pixel exactly, and camera grain doesn’t compress, so our PNG copies of phone photos were 7 to 12 times the size of the HEIC. The iPhone 13 Pro Max photo took about 9 seconds to save as PNG on a fast laptop, against under 3 seconds as JPG. Choose PNG only for an editor that you will save from many times over.

Colour: iPhones shoot wider than a JPG usually holds

Both iPhone files are tagged Display P3, a wider range of colours than sRGB, which is how a JPG without a profile gets read. If a converter copies the numbers across without converting them and without keeping the profile, colours shift: the same values mean slightly different colours in sRGB. Our tools convert every photo to sRGB, the way a colour-aware viewer would display it, and write no profile.

We compared our output against Apple’s own conversion to sRGB (macOS sips with the sRGB profile) using the CIEDE2000 colour difference, where 0 means identical. We also measured what skipping the conversion would have done.

Ignoring the profile put the iPhone photos 2.5 to 3.4 times further from Apple’s rendering than converting them did. The leftover 0.6 to 0.7 in our conversion comes mostly from how each decoder smooths the fine colour detail, which differs a little between decoders. On our flat colour patches one decoder was 0.04 away, no channel more than 3 levels out of 255; the other was 0.27, because its smoothing softens the sharp edges between patches.

The last column is the part no JPG can keep. One pixel in nine of the iPhone 13 Pro Max photo sits outside what sRGB can show, and those pixels move to the nearest colour that fits. On a normal screen you won’t see a difference, because the screen can’t show those colours either. On a recent iPhone or Mac screen, the HEIC can look a touch more vivid than any JPG made from it.

What doesn’t come across at all

Only the main picture is converted. The iPhone 13 Pro Max file held a second, hidden image, an HDR gain map that tells an HDR screen how much brighter to show the bright areas; a JPG from our tool is the standard picture only, so it looks the same everywhere and never brighter. Portrait photos can also carry depth data, which is dropped the same way. A Live Photo is two files, the HEIC still and a separate video, linked by the shot ID in the table above; convert the HEIC and you get the still, with the link gone.

Opening the photo took a quarter to two thirds of a second for our 8 to 16 megapixel files. Where your device has its own video decoder for this format we use it (0.25 to 0.30 seconds in our tests); otherwise a 960 KB decoder file is downloaded once and does the work on your device (0.30 to 0.67 seconds). Saving the JPG takes longer than opening the HEIC.