How to Convert HEIC to JPG on a Mac

The short version: if this is a one-off, stop reading and use Preview. If it is going to happen again next month, learn the one-line sips command and never think about it again.

Double-click the .heic file so it opens in Preview. Choose File → Export…, set Format to JPEG, and drag the Quality slider. Name the file and save it somewhere that is not the folder you started in, so you do not end up with two files called the same thing.

Preview handles more than one file at a time, which most guides get wrong. Select every HEIC in Finder, press Space, then open them all in Preview with Open With → Preview. In the Preview sidebar, select all the thumbnails (⌘A), then use File → Export Selected Images…. You get one format choice and one destination folder for the whole set.

The catch is that Preview’s Quality slider is unlabeled. There is no number, no file-size preview, and no memory of what you picked last time. That is the real reason the next section exists.

We took a 4752 × 2988 photograph, encoded it to HEIC (2,279,634 bytes), then converted it to JPEG at ten different quality settings with sips. The SSIM column compares each JPEG against the decoded HEIC, so 1.000000 would mean the two are pixel-identical.

Read the curve, not the rows. Going from quality 80 to quality 95 costs 1,006,905 extra bytes and buys 0.0022 of SSIM. Going from 95 to 100 costs another 2.9 MB and buys 0.0023. You are paying three megabytes to fix a difference you cannot see on a 5K display at 100% zoom.

Quality 80 is the answer for almost everyone. It sits at 0.9933 SSIM, which is past the point where JPEG artifacts stop being visible on photographic content, and it is 24% smaller than quality 95. If the file has to be small more than it has to be pretty, quality 60 is the break-even point where the JPEG is the same size as the HEIC it came from.

# convert one file at quality 80
sips -s format jpeg -s formatOptions 80 IMG_0421.HEIC --out IMG_0421.jpg

# whole folder, same setting, into a new directory
mkdir -p jpg && sips -s format jpeg -s formatOptions 80 *.heic --out jpg/

One warning about that second command: if you leave off --out, sips rewrites the originals in place. Always send output to a separate folder until you have checked the results.

Because you are converting a modern codec into a 1992 one. HEIC stores the image using HEVC intra-frame coding, which has better prediction, a bigger transform toolbox, and a deblocking filter. JPEG has 8 × 8 DCT blocks and Huffman coding. Handed the same picture at the same visual quality, JPEG needs more bytes. That is the whole story.

On a 4032 × 3024 camera-scale frame, the numbers were: HEIC 1,765,624 bytes, sips JPEG at default 2,642,575 bytes. That is a 49.7% increase for zero added detail, because the detail HEVC discarded is gone and JPEG cannot invent it back. Converting to PNG instead makes it far worse again.

This matters most when the reason you are converting is “the file is too big.” It is not. Converting HEIC to JPG is a compatibility operation, not a compression one. If size is the actual problem, the lever is quality or pixel dimensions, and understanding why the file is HEIC at all usually points at a better fix.

EXIF survives. We wrote a known set of tags into the HEIC fixture and read them back out of the converted JPEG with exiftool 13.50: Make, Model, DateTimeOriginal, Artist and Copyright all came through intact after a plain sips conversion.

The file system dates do not. The new JPEG gets today’s creation and modification timestamp, which is why a converted folder sorts wrong in Finder even though the photos still know when they were taken. Sort by Date Created and the trip is in the wrong order; the capture date is still sitting in EXIF where Photos and Lightroom will find it. Our batch HEIC guide covers restoring those timestamps with exiftool.

Live Photos do not survive. A Live Photo is a HEIC plus a paired MOV, and converting the still gives you a still. If the motion matters, export the Live Photo from Photos as a video first. Depth maps, Portrait mode segmentation and iPhone HDR gain maps are all in the same category: they are auxiliary images inside the HEIC container, and JPEG has nowhere to put them.

Yes, and it is the version most people actually want. A Finder Quick Action puts “Convert to JPEG” in the right-click menu, so selecting twelve HEICs and converting them is one gesture with no app launch.

Build it yourself in Automator: File → New → Quick Action, set Workflow receives to image files in Finder, add Copy Finder Items (so you keep the originals), then Change Type of Images set to JPEG. Save it as “Convert to JPEG”. Our Quick Action walkthrough has the full build, including the gotcha where Automator quietly replaces your originals if you skip the copy step.

Smol installs its own Quick Action from the app’s settings if you would rather not build one, and its version can convert, resize and strip metadata in the same pass. Either way the point is the same: the conversion should happen where the files are.

For a plain HEIC to JPG flip, sips beats us on both axes, and we measured it. Fifty 12-megapixel HEIC files: the sips loop finished in 17.35 seconds and produced 2,642,575-byte JPEGs at SSIM 0.994484. Smol, driven through its MCP server on the same files, took 26.3 seconds and produced 3,669,303-byte JPEGs at SSIM 0.994325. Slower and larger, because Smol keeps full-resolution colour (4:4:4 chroma) where sips halves it (4:2:0), and in a photograph the two are visually indistinguishable. Run sips with xargs -P 8 and the same job drops to 2.65 seconds.

For one photo, use Preview. It is already installed, the export dialog is three clicks, and there is nothing an app can add to that transaction except a purchase.

If the goal is a smaller file rather than a compatible one, converting is the wrong operation. JPEG will be bigger than the HEIC at every quality above 60. Compress the HEIC, or resize it, or send it as-is and let AirDrop do the conversion for you.

Smol is worth the $29 when the conversion is not the whole job. Converting a folder and capping it at 2,000 pixels and stripping GPS and keeping EXIF dates is four operations, and doing that with sips plus exiftool plus a loop is a script you will have to maintain. The other case is people who will not open Terminal, ever, and for whom the Finder Quick Action is the entire value proposition. It is a one-time purchase that runs entirely on your Mac, with no upload and no file-count cap. If you need the format reference rather than this one conversion, see every format Smol converts.