Converter / Live Photos
iPhone Live Photos, bursts and panoramas: what this converter can and cannot do
Updated
Only the still image is decoded on this device. Live Photo video is not sent anywhere, because it is never read. There is no account.
iPhone camera rolls are not a folder of simple JPEGs. A Live Photo is a still plus a short video. A burst is a stack of stills. A panorama is one very wide still that can be tens of megapixels. This converter is built for HEIC and HEIF stills. That is a useful job. It is not a video editor, and it will not pretend otherwise.
Live Photos: the still only
When you enable Live Photo, the iPhone writes a pair: a HEIC
(or sometimes JPEG) key still, and a short .mov
clip. On the phone they look like one object. On a computer
they are two files. This tool reads the still. It does not
decode, stitch, or attach the motion. The JPEG, PNG and PDF
you download are frozen frames. If you drop the
.mov, the converter rejects it with a short note
on the card. That is deliberate, not a bug.
If you need the motion, keep the pair on the iPhone or in iCloud, or export a video from Photos. If you only need something a Windows PC or a form will accept, the still is usually enough. To export just the still from the iPhone before you ever open this site: open the Live Photo, swipe up, and use the share sheet — or turn Live Photo off and take the shot again. Files already taken stay as they are.
Some exports from Photos already flatten the Live Photo into one JPEG. Those files are not HEIC. This converter will not accept them, because there is nothing to decode. Attach that JPEG directly.
Convert the still you do have
-
Find the
.heicor.heifthat belongs to the Live Photo, the burst frame, or the panorama. Ignore the sibling.mov. - Open the converter and drop that still, or use Choose files.
- Wait for the thumbnail. That means the still decoded in this tab. Download JPEG, PNG, or tick Include in PDF.
Bursts
A burst is many stills taken in a fraction of a second. On the iPhone they are grouped. Copied to a computer they are usually a list of separate HEIC files with similar names. This converter treats each file as its own job. Drop the frames you want. Leave out the blurry ones. There is no “pick the best of the burst” intelligence here — you already did that by choosing which files to add.
Files are converted one after another so a long burst is less likely to exhaust browser memory. If the tab becomes sluggish, convert in smaller groups. Closing the tab discards anything you have not downloaded. The originals on disk are not changed.
Panoramas
A panorama is one still, often much wider than a normal photo. The decoder has to hold the decoded pixels in memory. On a recent laptop that is usually fine. On a phone, or a machine with little spare RAM, a huge panorama can be slow or fail. If it fails, the card says so; try a machine with more memory, or crop on the iPhone first and convert the crop. This site does not resize on a server, because there is no server-side decode.
The PDF builder puts each selected still on its own A4 page and scales it to fit a margin. A very wide panorama becomes a short strip on a landscape page. That is readable enough for a “here is the street” attachment. It is not a print shop. If you need the panorama at full width for a designer, download JPEG or PNG instead of the PDF.
Sequences, HDR and other HEIC extras
HEIF can store more than one image in a file. This tool is aimed at ordinary iPhone stills. It does not promise to unpack every image in a sequence, or to preserve Apple’s gain-map HDR as an HDR JPEG. What you get is a decoded still re-encoded as a conventional JPEG or PNG. For most forms and chat apps that is the useful copy. If you need the camera’s HDR file exactly as Apple wrote it, keep the original HEIC and open it on an Apple device.
Portrait-mode depth data and the Live Photo video are in the same spirit: they are not reconstructed. You get the visible still. That is enough when the job is “make this attachable”. It is the wrong tool when the job is “edit the depth map” or “export the bounce”.
Checking you dropped the right thing
The drop zone accepts .heic and
.heif. It rejects JPEG, PDF, and Live Photo
video. If a card errors immediately, look at the filename.
A file ending in .JPG from the iPhone’s “Most
Compatible” camera setting is already JPEG — attach it. A
file ending in .mov is the motion half of a
Live Photo — keep it if you want the clip, and convert the
matching still if you want a picture.
After a successful convert, the card shows the original size and the JPEG size. Do not be surprised if the JPEG is larger than the HEIC: that is the format doing its job. EXIF is not copied. For Android-specific transfer notes see HEIC on Android. For portals that refuse the extension altogether, see why forms reject HEIC.