HEIC to JPG on Mac — four ways, and where each one breaks

Your iPhone shoots HEIC. It is a good format — roughly half the size of JPEG at the same quality — and it is still the one that a client’s Windows machine, an old CMS or a print shop refuses to open.

macOS can convert it. There are four routes, and they fail in different places, so it is worth knowing which one you are reaching for.

1. Quick Actions — the fastest, and most people do not know it exists

Select the photos in Finder, right-click, then Quick Actions → Convert Image. A small panel appears: pick JPEG, choose a size, confirm. New files land beside the originals.

This handles multiple files at once and requires nothing to be installed. For “I have twelve photos and need them as JPEG”, this is the answer, and you can stop reading.

Where it breaks: you get three coarse size presets and no quality control, no choice of where the output goes, and no way to keep or strip metadata deliberately.

2. Preview — one file, full control over quality

Open the photo in Preview, then File → Export…, set Format to JPEG, and use the Quality slider.

This is the only built-in route that gives you a real quality slider, which matters when you are exporting something for print. It is also strictly one file at a time — Preview can open many images at once, but Export applies to the selected one.

3. sips — built in, scriptable, genuinely fast

Every Mac ships with sips, an image tool with no interface at all:

sips -s format jpeg photo.heic --out photo.jpg

For a whole folder:

mkdir -p converted
for f in *.heic; do
  sips -s format jpeg "$f" --out "converted/${f%.heic}.jpg"
done

You can set quality too:

sips -s format jpeg -s formatOptions 80 photo.heic --out photo.jpg

This is the best free option for a large batch, and it is worth knowing about even if you never use it again.

But here is the limit that catches people. Ask your Mac what sips can actually write:

sips --formats | grep -iE "heic|webp|jpeg|png"

On current macOS you get:

org.webmproject.webp         webp
public.heic                  heic  Writable
public.jpeg                  jpeg  Writable
public.png                   png   Writable

Note the WebP line. It has no Writable flag. macOS reads WebP and cannot write it — so “convert these to WebP for the website” is a job the built-in tools simply cannot do, no matter which of the three routes above you pick.

4. A batch converter with real controls

When the job is a folder rather than a file — a shoot to hand off, a product catalogue, an image set for a site — the built-in routes each give up something: Quick Actions has no quality control, Preview has no batch, sips has no interface and cannot write WebP.

ByEase File Tools converts whole folders between JPEG, PNG, HEIC, TIFF and WebP with a quality setting and a filename suffix, from the Finder right-click menu. Everything runs on your Mac — the photos are not uploaded to convert them, which matters more than it sounds like for images that carry GPS coordinates.

While you are converting: check what is riding along

A HEIC straight off an iPhone carries EXIF metadata — the camera, the exact timestamp, and usually the GPS coordinates of where you stood. Converting to JPEG does not remove any of it.

If those photos are going to a client, a marketplace listing or a public site, strip the metadata deliberately rather than hoping the converter did it. That is its own guide, and it is the step people skip.

Quick reference

Route	Batch	Quality control	Writes WebP
Quick Actions	yes	no	no
Preview Export	no	yes	no
sips	yes, scripted	yes	no
ByEase File Tools	yes	yes	yes