Every photo an iPhone takes is a HEIC unless you told it otherwise. It is a good format — roughly half the size of a JPEG at the same quality — and it is quietly incompatible with a great deal of the world: older software, some printers, a client’s Windows machine, plenty of web upload forms.

So sooner or later a folder of them needs to become JPEGs. macOS gives you three ways to do that for free, and they differ in ways that matter once there are more than a handful of files.

Preview: fine for a folder, tedious for an archive

Preview converts in batch and most people never realise it. Select the files in Finder, open them all in Preview, select every thumbnail in its sidebar, then File → Export Selected Images…, choose JPEG, set the quality slider and export.

It works, it is already installed, and for a few dozen holiday photos it is the correct answer. Its limits show up at scale: no resizing beyond a quality slider, no control over what happens to metadata, no saved settings, and opening several thousand images in Preview at once is not a good time for anyone.

sips: one line, no interface

sips is a converter built into macOS, and it is genuinely capable:

sips -s format jpeg photo.heic --out photo.jpg

Wrap that in a loop and a folder converts in seconds. If you are comfortable in Terminal it costs nothing and is the fastest option here.

The trade-offs are the familiar ones: no preview of what you are about to do, no undo, and quality and resizing flags you have to look up each time. It is excellent for a job you do once and forget, and awkward as the thing you rely on every week.

Shortcuts: the automation most people should try first

The Shortcuts app has a Convert Image action, and a Quick Action built around it appears in Finder’s right-click menu. Build it once and converting a selection becomes a menu item.

This is the best free option for a recurring job, and worth an hour of your time if HEIC conversion is a regular chore. It resizes, it can strip metadata, and it runs on a selection without opening anything.

Where it runs out is fine control — colour profiles, DPI, per-destination presets, watermarks — and reporting. A Shortcut that partly fails tends to fail quietly.

Online converters: read this before uploading

The first results for this search are usually websites that convert in your browser. They work, and for one photo of nothing in particular they are harmless.

Be deliberate about it, though: you are uploading original photographs, with their location data and timestamps, to a third party whose retention policy you have not read. For family photos, client work, or anything with a home address in the EXIF, that is a poor trade for saving a few minutes. Prefer anything that runs on your own machine.

Converting a batch with a saved recipe

Archyv’s Image Conversion treats the conversion as a template — every decision saved together, so a repeat export is one choice rather than a fresh setup.

The built-in Web Optimized template is the sensible default for turning HEICs into shareable JPEGs: JPEG at 85% quality, longest edge 2048px, sRGB colour. Social Media is the same idea at 1080px with GPS stripped. There are six output formats in total — JPEG, PNG, TIFF, HEIC, AVIF and JPEG XL, the last two needing macOS 15 or later — six sizing modes, five colour spaces, and DPI from 1 to 1200.

Three details that matter more than the format list:

Your originals are not touched. Conversion writes new files into a destination folder you choose, so there is nothing to undo on the source.
Metadata handling is a deliberate choice, not a side effect. Six options, including Strip GPS Only — which removes location while keeping the copyright, camera and capture date intact. That is usually exactly what you want before publishing.
Output names come from a pattern. {original}_web keeps the source name and labels the copy; {seq:4} adds numbering that keeps names unique.

Video files in a selection are skipped automatically, so a mixed folder does not need sorting first.

What conversion does to quality, size and metadata

Three questions come up every time, so here they are plainly.

Does converting HEIC to JPG lose quality? Yes, a little, and unavoidably. HEIC is already a lossy format, so you are re-encoding — a second generation of compression on top of the first. At JPEG 85% or above the difference is invisible in normal viewing. Below about 75% you will start to see it in skies and smooth gradients. This is why the guidance is 90%+ for images that matter and 75% or less only for thumbnails.

Why is the JPEG bigger than the HEIC? Because HEIC is a more efficient codec — roughly half the size for equivalent quality. A JPEG of the same picture at good quality will often be about twice the file size. That is the cost of compatibility, and it is the trade you are making on purpose.

Does it keep the EXIF and GPS? It depends entirely on what you chose. Conversion can preserve everything, strip everything, or strip location only. Decide it in the template rather than discovering it afterwards — and if the files are going somewhere public, Strip GPS Only is the setting to reach for.

Which one to use

For a handful of photos: Preview. For a one-off folder and a comfortable terminal: sips. For a recurring job you want in the right-click menu: Shortcuts.

For a large library, for output that must meet a specific requirement — a client’s dimensions, a print colour space, a watermark — or for a job where you want the metadata decision made once and applied consistently: that is what a template-driven tool is for, and it is where Image Conversion earns its place.

Next: the Image Conversion reference covers every option, and Conversion Templates walks through building your own recipe. Converting a shoot for the web as well? Batch-converting RAW to web-ready JPEG covers the same ground from the RAW side.