The HEIC problem, explained simply
Since iOS 11, iPhones have saved photos in HEIC (High Efficiency Image Container), which is based on the HEVC video codec. It stores the same visual quality as JPEG in roughly half the space, which is why Apple switched. The catch is compatibility: Windows before version 10 build 1809 cannot open HEIC without a paid extension, many websites reject the format outright, and quite a few older Android phones show a blank tile.
Most people discover this at the worst possible moment — when a portal says “unsupported file type” five minutes before a deadline, or when a printer’s upload tool silently ignores the file.
There are three common workarounds. Changing the iPhone camera setting to “Most Compatible” makes new photos JPEG but does nothing for the hundreds already in your library. Exporting from the Photos app re-encodes to JPEG but loses the original quality and is tedious for more than a couple of files. The third option — decoding the HEIC directly in a browser — is what this tool does.
How a browser decodes HEIC without any app
HEIF is a container format: it wraps HEVC-encoded images with metadata, thumbnails and sometimes depth maps. Decoding it needs a real codec, which browsers do not ship. The solution is WebAssembly — a compiled binary that runs inside the browser sandbox at near-native speed.
This page loads heic2any, a WebAssembly build of the libheif and libde265 libraries, only when you actually add a HEIC file. That keeps the other 26 tools on this site fast, because nobody pays for a decoder they are not using.
The decoder runs on a worker thread, so the page stays responsive while a 12-megapixel photo is processed. The output is a standard JPEG held in memory, which is then placed on a page and written into a PDF — all inside your browser tab, with no network round trip at any point.
Live Photos, edited photos and other edge cases
Most iPhone photos convert without drama. A few specific cases deserve a warning.
Live Photos are a short video plus a still image. The still image converts fine; the motion part is simply ignored, which is what you want for a PDF.
Edited photos may store both the original and the edited version in the same file. The decoder returns the primary image, which is normally the edited one you see on screen.
Burst photos and RAW+HEIC pairs may produce more than one image from a single file. The tool takes the first and reports what it did, rather than silently producing duplicates.
Screenshots on iPhone save as PNG, not HEIC, so you can add them here too — the tool accepts both and only invokes the HEIC decoder when it is actually needed.
Getting a good PDF from iPhone photos of documents
If you are photographing a paper document rather than a scene, the quality of the final PDF depends almost entirely on the photo. A few habits make a big difference.
Shoot from directly above, not at an angle — a tilted page becomes keystoned and is harder to read. Use even, diffuse light: daylight from a window beats an overhead bulb, which creates a bright patch and a hard shadow. Keep the document flat and fill the frame, leaving a little margin. Avoid the phone’s flash, which blows out glossy paper.
Once converted, if the PDF needs to be under a portal limit, run it through Compress PDF to 200KB with grayscale switched on. A well-lit, straight photo of a document compresses beautifully because the information — black text on white paper — is highly compressible. A dim, angled photo never compresses well, no matter what settings you choose.
If you are converting a whole album for an application, keep the total page count sensible. Thirty photos of a rented flat is reasonable for a deposit dispute; thirty photos for a form that asks for two pages of supporting evidence is not, and it makes the reviewer’s job harder. Trim to the pages that carry information, put them in a logical order, and the document becomes something a stranger can follow without asking you questions.