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HEIC Compressor

Make iPhone HEIC photos smaller and keep them HEIC, with the same width, height and colours.

Drop HEIC files here or click to browse
Select HEIC or HEIF photos to compress, several at once
HEIC and HEIF files up to 40 MB each. A photo that cannot get smaller comes back unchanged.
Images are compressed in memory on our server and sent straight back. Nothing is stored.

Compress HEIC photos and keep them HEIC

iPhones save photos as HEIC unless the camera is set to Most Compatible. HEIC is already efficient, but a 48-megapixel photo still takes several megabytes. Many tools that call themselves HEIC compressors quietly turn the photo into a JPG. This one keeps it HEIC: the photo is re-encoded at the quality you set and stays a .heic file that opens in Photos, Preview and on any device that read the original.

Drop one photo or a batch, HEIC or HEIF, up to 40 MB each. A photo that is already compressed as far as it goes comes back unchanged.

What stays and what changes

Stays

  • The HEIC format, width and height
  • The colour profile, so wide-colour (Display P3) photos keep their colours
  • The photo's orientation, now applied to the pixels

Changes

  • Camera details and GPS location (EXIF) are removed
  • Portrait depth data and the HDR brightness map of recent iPhones are not carried over, so an HDR photo shows in standard range
  • Fine detail goes as the quality slider goes down

A Live Photo is a HEIC still plus a short video. This page compresses the still; the moving part is a MOV file, which the MOV compressor handles.

When you need a JPG instead

Keep HEIC for Apple devices, Google Photos and other apps that already open it; it is the smaller file at the same quality. Some upload forms, older Windows PCs and many websites reject HEIC, though. For those, the photo has to be converted, which this page doesn't do: an iPhone converts automatically when you share to most apps, and Settings > Camera > Formats > Most Compatible makes new photos JPG. A JPG you already have goes into the JPG compressor.

How to compress a HEIC file

  1. Drop your HEIC photos

    Add one or several HEIC or HEIF files, up to 40 MB each.

  2. Set the quality

    Leave it at 82 or move the slider down for a smaller photo. The same quality applies to the whole batch.

  3. Compress and download

    Click Compress HEIC, check the new size of each photo, and download the smaller HEIC files.

HEIC compressor questions

Yes. It is still a HEIC file, so iPhone, iPad, Mac and any other device that opened the original open it the same way.

Yes. HEIF is the same format family, and .heif files are accepted alongside .heic.

Yes. Camera details and GPS location are dropped from every photo the tool re-saves; see remove photo metadata for why that matters. Only a photo returned unchanged keeps its original data.

Re-encoding it would not have made it smaller at that quality, so the tool returns your original instead of a bigger copy. Move the slider down and try again.

No. The output is always HEIC. For a JPG, use the image converter on the converters page, or the iPhone setting described above.