How to open HEIC files on Windows

You email yourself a few photos from an iPhone, open them on a Windows PC, and Photos tells you the file format is not supported. The files are not damaged and you did nothing wrong. Windows simply cannot decode HEIC without a codec that Microsoft charges for.

HEIC is a container for images compressed with HEVC, the same video codec as H.265. Apple switched the iPhone camera to it because it produces files roughly half the size of JPEG at comparable quality. On a phone with thousands of photos, that is a lot of storage saved.

The catch is patents. HEVC is covered by a licensing pool, and shipping a decoder means paying for it. Apple pays and bundles it. Microsoft chose to sell it as a paid add-on instead. That single business decision is the entire reason your photos will not open.

If you regularly move photos to a PC, the cleanest fix is upstream. On the iPhone, open Settings → Camera → Formats and choose "Most Compatible". New photos are captured as JPEG, which every device on earth can open.

Two caveats: it does not convert the photos you already have, and JPEG files are larger, so your phone storage fills faster. Worth it if compatibility matters more to you than space.

There is also a subtler option. In Settings → Photos, "Automatic" under Transfer to Mac or PC converts HEIC to JPEG on the way out when you transfer over a cable — the phone keeps HEIC internally, but the PC receives JPEG.

If what you actually need is to view, share, print, or archive the photos rather than edit them, PDF solves the problem in one step. Every Windows machine opens PDFs without installing anything, and a PDF can hold the image at full quality while being trivially printable and emailable.

The converter below decodes HEIC using libheif compiled to WebAssembly, running inside the page. Your photos are decoded by your own browser and never uploaded, which matters more for personal photographs than people usually stop to consider. The page size follows the image orientation, so a landscape photo produces a landscape page instead of being letterboxed into portrait.

Microsoft sells the "HEVC Video Extensions" in the Microsoft Store for a small one-off fee. Once installed, HEIC works everywhere in Windows including File Explorer thumbnails, which is the most seamless outcome if you deal with these files constantly.

Free alternative: install a viewer with its own decoder. IrfanView and XnView both open HEIC without the Microsoft codec and can batch-convert a folder to JPEG. Worth it if you have hundreds of files to process at once.

A handful of photos to view or send: convert to PDF above, nothing to install. Ongoing transfers between iPhone and PC: change the camera format to Most Compatible. Hundreds of existing files to convert: install IrfanView and batch it. You use HEIC daily on Windows and want it to just work: buy the codec.