The Foreign Press Deadline That HEIC Almost Destroyed

Picture this: you are crouched in a fishing village in northern Portugal at 4:47am, your boots still wet from chasing the trawlers in, and you have just captured what might be the best set of photos of your entire career. The morning fog sitting on the water like a wool blanket. The old men hauling nets with hands that look like they have been doing it since before electricity. Absolute gold. Your editor at a travel magazine in Berlin is awake and waiting, deadline in 90 minutes, and you feel like a total professional for once in your life.

Then you plug your iPhone into your laptop and start to upload, and the email comes back almost immediately. "These files won't open. What format is this? Our system can't read HEIC."

If you have ever felt that specific, cold, stomach-dropping panic of watching a great professional moment collapse into a format compatibility argument at 5am in a foreign country, this post is for you.

The Silent Format Switch That Apple Never Really Warned You About

Back in 2017, Apple quietly switched the default camera format on iPhones from JPEG to HEIC (High Efficiency Image Container, sometimes called HEIF). The pitch was reasonable: HEIC files are roughly half the size of equivalent JPEGs with similar or better image quality. More photos on your phone. Less storage panic. Great idea in theory.

The problem is that most of the world never got that memo. Windows computers need a special codec to open HEIC files. Android phones look at them like a confused golden retriever. WordPress often refuses them. Email clients mangle them. Adobe software has only relatively recently started handling them gracefully. And newspaper picture desks in Berlin, apparently, want nothing to do with them before sunrise.

Apple's solution was to add a setting buried four menus deep that lets you shoot in JPEG instead. But by then, millions of people were already happily shooting HEIC without knowing it, and the files were quietly piling up everywhere: on laptops, in shared drives, in family WhatsApp chats, in press submission portals. A format that Apple introduced to be helpful became one of the most reliably awkward files to share with anyone who doesn't live inside Apple's ecosystem.

Who Actually Gets Caught By This

The travel photographer at 5am is an extreme example, but the HEIC problem shows up in much more mundane situations constantly:

• Freelancers submitting work to clients who use Windows machines and find the files simply won't open.
• Small business owners trying to upload product photos from their iPhone to a website that only accepts JPEG or PNG.
• People emailing photos to older relatives and getting a phone call half an hour later asking "why is your photo a white square?"
• Anyone submitting photos to a form or portal - school photo days, insurance claims, rental applications - that was built in 2019 and has never heard of HEIC.
• Anyone printing at a pharmacy or print kiosk where the touch screen just displays an error and a faint air of judgment.

The unifying thread is that none of these situations are the person's fault. The iPhone made a decision for you, and now you are standing in a pharmacy arguing with a kiosk.

What People Usually Try (And Why It's Painful)

The typical workaround for HEIC files involves downloading dedicated software, finding a website that requires an account, using AirDrop to transfer to a Mac and then export from Photos, or changing the iPhone camera setting (which doesn't fix the files you already have). Some people discover they can email photos to themselves and the Apple Mail app will auto-convert them, but that only works from an Apple device to begin with, and it feels like a cheat code that shouldn't be necessary.

There is also the privacy angle that almost nobody thinks about in the moment of panic. Many online conversion tools ask you to upload your photos to their servers. That fishing village photo? It is now sitting on a server somewhere in a data center you will never visit, owned by a company whose privacy policy you did not read at 5am. For personal photos especially, that is a trade you probably don't want to make just to change a file format.

The Simpler Option That Keeps Your Photos Yours

The HEIC Converter at COMBb2 runs entirely in your browser. Nothing gets uploaded. Your photos stay on your device, the conversion happens locally using your computer's own processing power, and the result drops into your downloads folder as a standard JPEG or PNG. It works on any device with a modern browser, which means Windows, Mac, Linux, Chromebook - whatever you have.

For the travel photographer in Portugal, that means the solution would have been: open a browser tab, drag the HEIC files in, convert to JPEG, attach to email, file before deadline, go eat a pastel de nata and feel like a professional again. Total time: under two minutes.

For the person arguing with a pharmacy kiosk, it means converting on your phone's browser before you arrive, which admittedly requires slightly more planning, but is still infinitely less frustrating than the kiosk conversation.

PNG vs JPEG: Which Should You Convert To?

This comes up often enough to be worth addressing directly.

• JPEG is the right choice for almost everything: sharing with clients, submitting to publications, uploading to social media, sending to a printer, emailing to anyone over 40. It is the universal format that works everywhere.
• PNG is better when you need a lossless copy - maximum quality, no compression artifacts - or when you are going to do further editing and want to preserve every detail. PNG files are larger, so they are not ideal for email attachments or slow connections.

When in doubt, JPEG. It has been working fine since 1992 and it will outlast all of us.

A Note on iPhone Settings Going Forward

If you want to stop this from happening at the source, there is a setting on your iPhone: Settings, Camera, Formats, then select "Most Compatible" instead of "High Efficiency". This makes your camera shoot JPEG directly. You will use slightly more storage, but you will never have the format argument again.

That said, changing the setting doesn't retroactively convert the thousand HEIC files already on your camera roll. For those, batch conversion is your friend. And if you want to squeeze those converted JPEGs down before sending them anywhere, the image compressor is right there for you.

Conclusion

HEIC is not a bad format. It is genuinely efficient, and in a world where everyone used Apple devices exclusively, it would be the obvious choice. But we do not live in that world, and file compatibility problems have a long and proud tradition of ruining people's days at the worst possible moments. The good news is that converting HEIC files is now a two-minute browser task that requires no software, no account, and no uploading your photos to a stranger's server. If you have HEIC files piling up that need to go somewhere the world can actually open them, the fix is genuinely that simple.