How to make your iPhone shoot in JPEG instead of HEIF

Learn how to change the iPhone or iPad camera settings to make it shoot pictures in the universally compatible JPEG format instead of HEIF/HEIC.

Taking a picture with iPhone

Out of the box, your iPhone or iPad Camera app captures photos in High Efficiency Image File Format (.HEIF/.HEIC files) and videos in the High-Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC or H.265) format instead of the ubiquitous JPEG and H.264 media formats.

HEIF is great! Using the efficient H.265 codec to compress images, this format maintains a similar quality as JPEG at a much lower file size. HEIF images take at most half the storage space, sync with iCloud faster, and consume less bandwidth and data when sharing.

However, not all devices, apps, websites, and services support this format. So, if you often find yourself having to manually convert HEIC to JPG, and you don’t want to do that, you can simply set your iPhone to save photos in the universally compatible JPEG format.

Change iPhone camera format to JPEG

  1. Open the Settings app on your iPhone or iPad.
  2. Scroll down and tap Camera.
  3. Tap the Formats option.
  4. Select Most Compatible in place of High Efficiency under the Camera Capture heading.
Set iPhone Camera Capture to Most Compatible format

This will switch the Camera app from saving HEIC images and H.265-encoded videos to the much more universally compatible JPEG/H.264 formats. However, note that the Most Compatible setting won’t convert your existing HEIF/H.265 media to JPEG/H.264.

Tip: If you have HEIF-encoded images in the Photos app and would like to transfer them to a computer as JPEGs, go to Settings > Photos and tap Automatic under the Transfer to Mac or PC section. This will transcode HEIF/H.265 media into JPEG/H.264 when using the USB transfer method.

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