HEIC vs JPG: Quality, File Size, and When to Use Each
I’ve seen a lot of forum posts claiming HEIC is “way better” than JPG or that converting to JPG “ruins your photos.” The truth is more nuanced than either camp admits. Both formats make trade-offs, and which one you should use depends entirely on what you’re doing with the photo.
The file size difference is real
HEIC files are roughly 40-50% smaller than equivalent JPGs. Not sometimes — consistently. Take a standard 12-megapixel iPhone photo at default settings:
| Format | Size | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| HEIC (default) | ~1.8 MB | Excellent quality |
| JPG at quality 92 | ~3.5 MB | Matches HEIC visually |
| JPG at quality 80 | ~1.9 MB | Same size, but artifacts start showing |
To get a JPG down to HEIC’s file size, you have to drop quality to around 80. At that level, you’ll start seeing compression artifacts — blocky patches in gradients and smeared details around sharp edges. HEIC gets there without the visual penalty because HEVC compression is just more efficient than JPEG’s DCT approach.
Quality: honestly hard to tell apart
Put a well-exposed HEIC photo next to the same image converted to JPG at quality 92 and try to spot the difference. On a phone screen? Impossible. On a 27-inch monitor? You’d have to zoom to 200% and squint. For any normal viewing scenario, they look identical.
Where HEIC pulls ahead is at the extremes. When you really crank down the quality for smaller files, HEIC degrades gracefully — things get soft and slightly blurry. JPG gets ugly, with those telltale blocky artifacts around text and edges. If you need aggressively small files, HEIC holds up better.
The color depth thing
HEIC handles 16-bit color (over 281 trillion possible colors) while JPG caps at 8-bit (16.7 million). That sounds like a massive gap, but in practice you’ll only notice it in specific scenarios: photos of sunsets or skies with very subtle gradients, or if you’re doing serious color grading in an editing app and need the extra headroom.
For sharing on social media, printing 4x6s, or sending photos to family? The 8-bit vs 16-bit difference is academic.
What HEIC can do that JPG can’t
Forget compression for a second. HEIC has structural advantages — transparency support, Live Photos, depth maps, burst shot bundling, and richer metadata. JPEG wasn’t designed for any of these. I covered the full list of HEIC’s container features in a separate post if you want the details.
When to stick with JPEG
JPEG’s killer feature isn’t technical — it’s ubiquity. Every device made in the last 30 years can open a JPEG. Every website accepts it. Every email client displays it. Every print shop processes it. That kind of universality is hard to overstate.
Use JPEG when you’re:
- Sharing photos with anyone who isn’t on Apple devices
- Uploading to websites, forms, or platforms
- Attaching images to emails or documents
- Sending files to a print service
- Working with any tool that doesn’t explicitly support HEIC
When to keep HEIC
Keep your originals as HEIC when you’re:
- Storing photos on your iPhone (half the storage usage is real)
- Working within the Apple ecosystem (Mac, iPad, iPhone)
- Shooting Live Photos or using Portrait Mode
- Archiving and you want the highest quality original
The practical approach
Don’t overthink this. Shoot in HEIC on your phone (the storage savings are worth it), and convert to JPG when you need to share outside the Apple world. At quality 92, the conversion is visually lossless and the files work everywhere.
heic.site converts in your browser — no upload, no quality loss beyond what you choose. Set it to 92 and forget about it. Got a whole folder to deal with? Check out the batch conversion guide. And if you’re on Windows and can’t even open the files yet, start with how to open HEIC on Windows.