How to Make iPhone Take JPG Photos Instead of HEIC (Step-by-Step)

Step 1: Open the Settings app on your iPhone.

Step 2: Scroll down through the list of system applications and tap 'Camera'.

Step 3: At the top of the Camera settings screen, select 'Formats'.

Step 4: You will see two options: 'High Efficiency' (Apple's default, which uses HEIC and HEVC) and 'Most Compatible'. Tap 'Most Compatible' to select it.

Once selected, your camera will immediately begin saving new still photos in standard JPEG (.jpg) format. You do not need to restart your device; future snapshots will be fully compatible with any computer, operating system, and web portal.

Trade-off 1: Photos will consume nearly twice as much storage space. Because JPEG is an older compression standard, a photo that takes up 1.8MB in HEIC will often require 3.5MB to 5MB in JPG at comparable visual quality. If you own an iPhone with 64GB or 128GB of internal memory, your storage bar will fill up much more quickly.

Trade-off 2: Video recording modes become restricted. Advanced video modes—such as 4K at 60 frames per second, 1080p at 240 fps slow-motion, and cinematic HDR video—require the high throughput of the HEVC codec. When 'Most Compatible' is selected, iOS may restrict these high-frame-rate options or fall back to H.264, which consumes massive amounts of storage.

Trade-off 3: Live Photos still work, but with larger files. Live Photos remain operational in 'Most Compatible' mode, but iOS stores them as a pairing of a full JPEG image and an associated MOV video clip, resulting in noticeably larger storage footprints for every capture.

It is crucial to understand that toggling your camera setting to 'Most Compatible' is not retroactive. It only applies to photos taken after the setting is changed; the hundreds or thousands of HEIC photos already stored in your Apple Photos library will remain in HEIC format.

When you need to export or upload those historical photos, you can easily batch convert them using our in-browser tool. Because files are converted directly in your browser and are not uploaded to any server, you can process entire albums quickly without bandwidth delays or privacy risks.

If you want to keep the storage-saving advantages of HEIC on your iPhone while ensuring effortless file transfers to a Windows desktop, Apple provides a helpful automated transfer setting.

Open iPhone Settings, navigate to 'Photos', scroll to the very bottom, and look for 'Transfer to Mac or PC'. Change this setting from 'Keep Originals' to 'Automatic'. With this enabled, whenever you connect your iPhone to a Windows PC via a Lightning or USB-C cable, iOS automatically converts your HEIC photos to standard JPG format during the file transfer, giving you the best of both worlds.