HEIC vs JPG
Apple switched iPhones to HEIC in 2017 for a good reason, and it is also the reason your photos will not open on your work laptop. Both things are true at once.
The short answer
HEIC is the better format and JPG is the more useful one. HEIC stores the same picture in roughly half the space with slightly better quality, because it uses modern video compression. JPG is thirty years old and worse at almost everything except the part that matters most in practice: every device, website and application can open it without being asked twice.
Keep your originals in HEIC on your phone, and convert copies to JPG when you need to send, upload or print them.
Side by side
| HEIC | JPG | |
|---|---|---|
| File size | About half the size | Larger for the same quality |
| Quality at that size | Better, especially in gradients and shadows | Good, but banding shows sooner |
| Opens everywhere | Apple devices, Windows 11 with a codec, newer browsers | Effectively everything made since 1992 |
| Colour depth | Up to 10 bit, so smoother skies | 8 bit |
| Transparency | Supported | Not supported |
| Live Photos and bursts | Several images in one file | One image per file |
| Editing round trips | Loses a little each save | Loses a little each save |
Why Windows struggles with HEIC
HEIC leans on HEVC, the compression used for 4K video, and HEVC is patented. Apple pays for that and builds decoding into its hardware. Microsoft chose not to bundle it, so a stock Windows install can see the file but not read the picture inside it, which is why you get a blank preview or an error rather than a missing file.
Windows 11 can be taught to read HEIC through codecs from the Microsoft Store, but that is a per machine fix. It does nothing for the person you email the photo to.
Does converting to JPG lose quality?
A little, unavoidably, because both formats are lossy and the image is re-compressed. At a high quality setting the difference is not visible at normal viewing sizes or in print. The practical loss is smaller than the practical cost of a photo nobody can open.
What matters more is not converting repeatedly. Convert once from the HEIC original rather than converting a JPG that came from another JPG, and keep the HEIC file as your master.
Which should you keep?
Keep HEIC on your phone: it is the original, it is smaller, and everything in the Apple ecosystem reads it. Convert to JPG at the point of sharing, when uploading to a site that rejects HEIC, or when sending to someone on Windows or Android.
If the HEIC files are causing you constant trouble and you would rather not think about it again, you can stop your iPhone producing them: Settings, then Camera, then Formats, then Most Compatible. New photos will be JPG, at roughly twice the file size.