How to Convert HEIC to JPG

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This guide will walk you through converting HEIC images to JPG using command-line tools on Linux.

I recently moved almost 20 years of family photos and videos to a home server. In more recent years, my wife and I have been taking photos on iPhones, and many of the files were stored in a .heic format.

While setting up my home server I noticed that I couldn't open HEIC files on Linux without installing additional codecs or converting the files. I decided to convert the files for best compatibility across all my devices.

Prerequisites

To convert HEIC files, you'll need the libheif library and its tools installed.

On Fedora, install them with:

sudo dnf install libheif-freeworld libheif-tools

For other distributions, check your package manager or build from source as described in the libheif repository.

Converting HEIC files to JPG

Once the libheif library is installed, you can use the heif-convert command to convert individual files to JPG:

heif-convert filename.heic

To convert all HEIC files in the current directory to JPG:

find . -type f -iname "*.heic" | while read -r file; do
    echo "Converting $file"
    heif-convert "$file"
done

This script finds all HEIC files in the current directory, loops through them, and uses heif-convert to create JPG versions. The output files will have the same name as the original but with a .jpg extension, placed in the same directory.

heif-convert preserves image quality as much as possible when converting. I personally couldn't tell the difference in quality.

If you don't want to keep the original HEIC files, you can permanently delete them all with:

find . -type f -iname "*.heic" -delete

Closing thoughts

HEIC seems to be a pain for non-Apple devices. While codecs can be installed to view them, I preferred to convert them to JPG for the best compatibility.

After converting all my photos, I found the iOS camera app has a setting to create files in 'most compatible' format (JPG) instead of 'high efficiency' (HEIC), which I've now enabled to reduce the need for future conversions.

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