Every time you tap the shutter button on your iPhone, the camera quietly decides which file format to use — and that decision affects storage space, editing flexibility, and whether the photo will even open on other devices. Most people never change the defaults. Understanding what each format actually does can help you make better choices about how your photos are stored, shared, and used.
HEIC is what your iPhone saves almost every photo as by default. Apple switched from JPEG to HEIC as the standard format with iOS 11 in 2017, and the main reason was storage efficiency: HEIC files are approximately 40–50% smaller than JPEGs at the same perceptual quality.
The format's compression is powered by the HEVC codec (H.265) — the same algorithm used to compress 4K video. Applying video-derived compression to still images turns out to be remarkably effective. The technical name, High Efficiency Image Container, refers both to the compression gains and to the format's ability to store multiple types of data in a single file.
HEIC supports 10-bit color depth, compared to JPEG's 8-bit. This translates to smoother gradients in skies and skin tones, better highlight retention, and more accurate colors in high-contrast scenes. Practically speaking, this is one reason iPhone photos often look richer than you might expect from a smartphone — the format is capturing more tonal nuance than JPEG can hold.
The format can also bundle multiple items into one container: a depth map for Portrait mode photos, a Live Photo's motion clip alongside the still frame, HDR metadata, and thumbnail previews. This is genuinely powerful, but it's also what causes problems when you try to share HEIC files with Android or Windows users who don't have native support for the format.
JPEG has been the dominant photo format since the early 1990s. It works everywhere without exception: every browser, every operating system, every email client, every Android device, every photo lab, and every piece of software that deals with images at all. That universality is its most important feature.
The tradeoffs compared to HEIC are real. JPEG files are roughly twice the size of HEIC files at comparable quality, and JPEG only supports 8-bit color depth (16.7 million colors versus HEIC's 1.07 billion). JPEG is also always lossy — there is no lossless JPEG mode. It doesn't support transparency or multiple images per file.
None of these limitations matter when your goal is to send a photo to your mom's Android phone, attach something to an email, or upload to a form on a website. For those purposes, JPEG's universality is more valuable than HEIC's technical advantages.
To switch your iPhone to saving photos as JPEG: open Settings → Camera → Formats and select Most Compatible. New photos and videos will now be saved as JPEG and H.264 respectively. This setting only affects new photos — your existing HEIC library remains unchanged.
ProRAW is available exclusively on iPhone Pro and Pro Max models (starting with iPhone 12 Pro). It's a fundamentally different category from HEIC and JPEG. Rather than a processed image, ProRAW captures the raw sensor data — everything the camera recorded before any of the iPhone's computational photography processing was applied.
ProRAW files are enormous by smartphone standards: typically 25 MB to 75 MB per image, versus around 2 MB for a typical HEIC file of the same scene. In exchange, you get maximum editing flexibility. When you open a ProRAW file in a professional editor like Adobe Lightroom or Darkroom, you're working with the full tonal range the sensor captured. You can recover detail from near-blown highlights, lift deep shadows without banding, and make significant color corrections without the degradation that comes from editing a compressed image.
To enable ProRAW: go to Settings → Camera → Formats and turn on Apple ProRAW. Once enabled, a RAW badge appears in the Camera app that you can toggle on or off per shot — you don't have to shoot ProRAW for everything.
ProRAW is designed for photographers who intend to edit their photos deliberately. If you mostly shoot snapshots or share directly from your phone without editing, ProRAW's file sizes and compatibility limitations (not all apps support it) are hard to justify. Use it for shoots where you know you'll spend time in post-production.
Live Photos aren't really a separate file format so much as a camera mode that captures additional data alongside the still image. When you take a Live Photo, your iPhone records a 1.5-second clip before the shutter press and 1.5 seconds after it — approximately 3 seconds of video in total, bundled with the still frame.
The resulting file is a HEIC container holding both the still image and the motion clip. This is why Live Photos are slightly larger than standard HEIC photos despite looking similar: they're carrying a short video clip inside the same file.
On Apple devices — iPhone, iPad, Mac — Live Photos play as intended when you tap and hold. The motion reveals the moment around the shutter click, which can be genuinely delightful for capturing candid moments. On Android, Windows, and web browsers, the Live Photo typically appears as a still image; the motion component is invisible to the viewer or simply not rendered.
You can extract a Live Photo's motion clip as a standalone video on your iPhone: open the photo in the Photos app, tap the share button, and choose Save as Video. This creates a separate MP4 you can share normally with anyone on any device.
You'll see both terms used, sometimes interchangeably, and the distinction is worth understanding even if it rarely affects day-to-day use.
HEIF (High Efficiency Image Format) is the container standard — a broad specification developed by MPEG that defines how image data, metadata, and auxiliary content like depth maps and thumbnail sequences are organized inside a file. HEIF can technically hold images compressed with various codecs.
HEIC (High Efficiency Image Container) is the specific variant Apple uses, in which the image data is compressed with the HEVC codec. So every iPhone HEIC file is technically a HEIF file, but HEIF files compressed with other codecs would not be called HEIC.
In practice: when Apple's documentation, iOS, and macOS refer to photos, they call the format HEIC. When Windows and some third-party tools discuss the same files, they sometimes say HEIF. The .heic extension you see on actual files is the reliable identifier. The two terms refer to the same files your iPhone produces, and the distinction is mainly relevant if you're working with HEIF files from non-Apple sources.
For most people, the default settings — HEIC for photos, Live Photos on — are the right choice. Here's a quick decision guide for when the defaults aren't ideal:
Most people are well served by keeping HEIC as their camera setting and bookmarking a converter for the occasional moment when they need to share a photo with someone who can't open HEIC. The storage savings are real and ongoing; the compatibility issue only arises when sharing with specific people.
InkTools offers browser-based converters for the most common iPhone photo conversion needs. All run locally in your browser — nothing is uploaded to a server, so your photos stay private.
To convert on a Mac: the Photos app supports batch export (File → Export → Export Photos) with a choice of format including JPEG, PNG, and TIFF. This is the best option for converting your entire library or a large selection of photos at once.
Need to convert an iPhone photo to a format that works everywhere?
Browse all InkTools converters →