How to make an iPhone shoot JPG
If your photos mostly end up on a Windows PC, changing one setting beats converting every time. The switch hides in the camera settings and takes about ten seconds — but a few things can make it look like it did not work.
The steps to shoot JPG
- Open Settings on the iPhone.
- Scroll down and tap Camera.
- Tap Formats at the top.
- Under Camera Capture, select Most Compatible.
From then on the camera writes standard JPG files. Apple's own description of the two options is that High Efficiency uses HEIF/HEVC for smaller files, while Most Compatible uses JPEG/H.264 for better compatibility.
Know the cost up front: after switching to Most Compatible, the same number of photos takes up roughly twice the storage, and video moves from HEVC to H.264 with a similar size increase. If your storage is tight, that is a real trade-off.
Why it still saves HEIC after the change
This is the most common confusion. New photos really do come out as JPG after the change, so if you still see .heic, it is usually one of these:
- You changed High Efficiency instead of Most Compatible — the two options sit right next to each other. Go back and confirm which one is ticked.
- You are looking at old photos — the setting only applies to photos taken after the change. Existing HEIC files are not converted. This is the one people miss most.
- You used a third-party camera app — the system setting has no control over how another app encodes its output. Change it inside that app's own settings.
- The photo arrived from somewhere else — files from iCloud shared albums, AirDrop, or saved out of a messaging app keep their original format regardless of your camera setting.
Getting JPG without changing the setting
If you only need a JPG occasionally, changing the camera setting is a bad trade — you give up half your storage permanently. All three of these get you a JPG while HEIC stays the default:
1. Convert during sharing
Select a photo in Photos, tap Share, and choose Save to Files or AirDrop. Some sharing paths convert automatically — sending to a non-Apple device, or via Mail, generally makes iOS attach a compatible format.
2. Use a browser-based converter
Drop the .heic files into a converter page, select several at once, and download them together. Prefer tools that process locally without uploading. You can verify that yourself: open the browser's developer tools, switch to the Network panel, and watch whether any file-sized request leaves during the conversion.
3. Use sips on a Mac
If the photos are already synced to a Mac, one command converts a whole folder and can resize at the same time.
How third-party camera apps fit in
Most people have more than one camera app installed, and their format settings are independent:
- Most third-party camera apps output JPG by default and never produce HEIC at all.
- Some professional camera apps can output HEIF, which has to be turned off in that app's own settings.
- Photos taken inside messaging apps use those apps' own compression, unrelated to the system camera setting.
So the answer to why some photos are HEIC and others are JPG is usually simple: they were not taken by the same app.