Someone sends you a photo. You tap it and nothing happens — or your computer opens a dialogue box asking what you'd like to do with a file it doesn't recognise. The person who sent it did nothing unusual. They took a picture with their phone and shared it, the way people have shared pictures for twenty years.
The file is a .heic, and the reason it won't open has almost nothing to do with the photo, your device, or the person who sent it.
The irritating part: HEIC is genuinely good
It would be easier if HEIC were simply bad. It isn't. It uses a much newer compression method than JPG, which dates from 1992, and it can store things JPG can't touch — transparency, depth information, bursts of frames, and Live Photos, all inside a single file.
The efficiency is real. Converting one 3072 × 4080 photo from this site's testing — 1,295 KB as the camera saved it — produced a 1,948 KB JPG at quality 90. Roughly one and a half times larger for the same picture. That's the cost of a format that opens everywhere.
Worth being precise about
That's a comparison of two files at the settings each tool used, not a controlled test of the two codecs at identical image quality. It shows what the conversion costs you, which is the thing you actually need to know. How these figures are measured.
So the format isn't the problem. Which raises the obvious question.
So why can't anything open it?
HEIC stores its image data using HEVC, also called H.265 — the same compression standard used for a great deal of modern video. And HEVC is one of the most heavily patented pieces of technology in consumer computing.
The patents aren't held by one company you could simply write a cheque to. They're spread across thousands of holders, and the licences to use them have historically been sold through several competing pools. One pool alone — Access Advance's HEVC Advance programme — administers over 29,000 patents from 46 licensors. A separate programme run by Via LA covered a different set. Others sat outside any pool at all.
For anyone building software, that's the whole problem. There was no single place to go and no single number to budget for, and getting it wrong meant a lawsuit. Implementers of the standard have complained about this fragmentation for years, because what they need is straightforward: broad enough coverage to ship a product without being sued.
So most of them didn't ship it. No major browser decodes HEIC. Plenty of desktop software won't touch it. Apple shipped it as the iPhone camera default in 2017 anyway.
The result is a decade of photographs sitting in a format that a large share of the world's software was never licensed to read — and the people who paid the price were the ones who just wanted to send a picture to their mum.
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The file is not corrupt. Windows opens it, the phone that made it opens it, and Safari would display it. This browser refuses because its maker never licensed the patents HEIC depends on.
The bit that makes people properly angry
On Windows, viewing these files means installing extensions from the Microsoft Store. There are two, and you generally need both: HEIF Image Extensions, which handles the container and is free, and HEVC Video Extensions, which does the actual decoding — and that one is paid.
Microsoft has been open about why. The codec is licensed technology and they'd owe royalties on every copy, so rather than add that cost to every Windows licence, it's sold separately to the people who need it. As a business decision it's entirely reasonable.
As an experience it is not. You bought a computer, someone sent you a photo, and the operating system wants a payment before it will show it to you. Adobe's own support documentation, for anyone trying to open a .heic in Photoshop on Windows, instructs users to go and buy the extension.
It's worse in managed environments. The free HEIF extension is only distributed through the Microsoft Store, with no offline installer for IT departments to deploy. Organisations that block the Store — which is most of them — simply cannot open these files at all, no matter what they're willing to pay.
AVIF had the same idea and nobody hates it
AVIF is the same generational leap: a modern video codec repurposed to store still images, with comparable efficiency gains over JPG. Technically it's HEIC's direct rival.
It's also royalty-free by design, built on AV1 by a consortium formed specifically so that browser makers, operating systems and open-source projects could implement it without a licence negotiation.
Chrome, Firefox, Safari and Edge all support it. It appears in image editors and on websites. Nobody complains about AVIF, because nobody has ever been asked to pay to look at one.
Two formats, the same ambition, roughly the same era. One is everywhere and one is a running joke. The engineering isn't what separated them.
The market noticed
As of 2026 the HEVC pools are consolidating — Access Advance has acquired Via LA's HEVC programme, with the stated aim of offering a single licence instead of several. Industry coverage has framed the move as a response to the rise of royalty-free AV1. Simplifying the licensing is an admission that the licensing was the problem.
What to actually do about it
If you've been sent one and just need to see it, convert it to JPG. It runs in your browser, the file isn't uploaded anywhere, and it takes a couple of seconds. Expect the JPG to be larger — that's the trade you're making, and it's usually worth it.
If your phone is producing them and you'd rather it didn't, the setting is easy to change and it's covered at the bottom of the HEIC to JPG page. You'll use more storage. Everyone you send photos to will stop asking why they can't open them.
The bottom line
HEIC isn't hated for being a bad format. It's hated for being a good one you can't reliably open, and that was never an engineering decision. AVIF made the opposite choice about licensing and got adopted quietly, everywhere, by everyone.
Formats don't win on merit. They win on being free to implement.
Got a HEIC that won't open?
Convert it to JPG in your browser. Nothing is uploaded.
