HEIF and HEIC are close enough that people reasonably assume they are the same thing, and for practical purposes they nearly are. HEIF — High Efficiency Image File Format — is the container. HEIC is what you call a HEIF file whose contents were compressed with HEVC, which is what Apple devices produce. So every HEIC is a HEIF, but not every HEIF is a HEIC.
Where .heif files come from
The extension usually turns up outside Apple’s ecosystem. Canon and Sony mirrorless bodies write .HIF or .heif when shooting in 10-bit HEIF mode. Some Android manufacturers use it for their high-efficiency capture setting. Image tools that transcode into the container often default to the generic .heif rather than .heic. If your file came off a camera rather than an iPhone, this is probably the page you want.
The 10-bit question
This matters more for camera HEIF than for phone HEIC. Mirrorless cameras shooting HEIF do it specifically to capture 10 bits per colour channel rather than 8, which is four times as many tonal steps and the whole reason the mode exists. JPEG cannot store that. Converting flattens the image to 8-bit, and the place you will notice is smooth gradients — a clear sky, a studio backdrop, a soft-focus background — where subtle banding can appear that was not there before.
- If the shot is destined for the web or for sharing, the banding is very unlikely to matter and JPEG is the right call.
- If you intend to grade or heavily edit the image, convert to PNG instead to avoid stacking a second lossy pass on top.
- If the file is a camera original you may reprocess later, keep it. Convert a copy, not your master.
What else changes
HDR content is tone-mapped to standard range, so very bright highlights come down. Any auxiliary images the container holds — thumbnails, depth maps, alternate exposures — are discarded, since a JPEG holds exactly one picture. EXIF metadata including GPS coordinates is removed, because the image is rebuilt from decoded pixels. Rotation flags are applied, so the output is the right way up.
Why the extension is inconsistent
There is no single authority deciding which suffix a HEIF file gets, so manufacturers picked their own. Apple standardised on .heic, Canon and Sony chose .hif, and general-purpose tools often write .heif. All three can contain byte-identical data. This tool accepts every one of them, which is why the HEIC and HEIF pages here are the same converter under two names — whichever matches the files in front of you is the right one to use.
Decoding happens in this tab. Safari reads HEIF natively; other browsers download a 1.4 MB decoder once and cache it. Nothing is uploaded, so camera originals stay on your own machine.