HEIC vs JPEG — which should you keep?
Keep HEIC for photos living on your phone or Mac, where the format halves your storage use and gives editing tools far more colour data to work with. Use JPEG for anything leaving your control — email attachments, upload forms, print services, or files going to someone on Windows. The right answer is usually both: shoot HEIC, and export JPEG copies when sharing. HEIC wins on every technical measure; JPEG wins on compatibility, and compatibility is the thing that stops a photo being usable at all.
Where HEIC clearly wins
File size, by roughly a factor of two at matching visual quality. That single fact is why Apple made the switch.
Colour depth, at up to 16 bits per channel against JPEG's 8. This is not about seeing more colours on screen; it is about how much room an editor has to work. Pulling detail out of a bright sky or a dark shadow needs data to be there in the first place, and JPEG throws away much more of it.
Features JPEG has no concept of: an alpha channel for transparency, multiple images in one file, and auxiliary data like the depth map that lets Portrait mode blur be re-edited after the fact.
Where JPEG wins, and why it decides the argument
Every piece of image software written in the last thirty years reads JPEG. That is the whole case, and it is enough.
HEIC by contrast does not open reliably on Windows, does not display in Chrome or Firefox, is rejected by a great many upload forms, and is not understood by most print services or older desktop software. A photo you cannot open is worth nothing regardless of how efficiently it was compressed.
What converting actually destroys
Going from HEIC to JPEG is not a neutral repackaging. The extra colour precision is reduced to 8 bits. Transparency, if present, is flattened onto a solid background. Live Photos lose their video component. Burst sequences lose every frame but the first. Depth maps are discarded, so Portrait blur becomes permanent rather than adjustable.
The file also gets bigger, typically between one and a half and two and a half times, because you are giving up HEVC's compression efficiency to gain compatibility.
None of that matters for a photo you are emailing to a relative. All of it matters for your only copy of an image you might want to edit properly later.
A rule that works
Treat HEIC as your master and JPEG as your delivery format. Shoot HEIC, keep HEIC in your library, and generate JPEG copies at the point of sharing. This is the same logic photographers apply to RAW files, one step down the scale.
The practical version on an iPhone: leave the camera on High Efficiency, and set Settings, Photos, Transfer to Mac or PC to Automatic so JPEGs are produced when you move photos to a computer. You get both, and you never think about it again.
A note on archiving
If you are choosing a format for photos you want readable in thirty years, the calculation shifts. JPEG is about as safe a bet as digital formats get — it is universally implemented, thoroughly documented, and far too widely used to disappear.
HEIC's long-term position is less certain, precisely because it depends on patent licensing rather than being freely implementable. Patents do expire, and support tends to improve rather than vanish, so this is not an argument for converting your library today. But for a genuine long-term archive, JPEG remains the more conservative choice.
Frequently asked questions
Is HEIC better quality than JPEG?
At the same file size, yes, clearly — it retains more detail and stores more colour precision. Both are lossy formats, so neither is perfect, but HEIC is substantially more efficient.
Should I convert my whole photo library to JPEG?
Almost certainly not. You would double your storage use and permanently discard colour depth, depth maps and Live Photo video. Convert individual photos when you need to share them.
Does converting HEIC to JPEG lose quality?
Yes, though usually imperceptibly for a single conversion at high quality. The bigger losses are structural: colour depth, transparency, extra frames and depth data are all discarded.
Which is better for a website?
Neither. Browsers do not decode HEIC, and JPEG is inefficient by modern standards. Use WebP or AVIF for web images.
Which should I use for long-term archiving?
JPEG is the more conservative choice, being universally implemented and freely usable. HEIC depends on patent licensing, which makes its very long-term position slightly less certain.