HEIF is a standard, HEIC is Apple's flavor of it
HEIF (High Efficiency Image File Format) is not an Apple invention. It is an international standard, ISO/IEC 23008-12, that defines a container able to hold still images compressed with modern video codecs. HEIC is the specific combination of that container with HEVC compression, which Apple adopted for the iPhone in 2017. Because HEIF is an open standard, Apple is far from its only user: Samsung phones offer a HEIF option in the camera settings, and Sony and Canon mirrorless cameras can shoot HEIF stills as a smaller alternative to RAW plus JPG. The naming gets messy, but the plumbing is shared. For the Apple-specific story, see What is HEIC?
One decoder for .heif, .hif and .heic
If you shoot HEIF on a Sony or Canon body, the card fills with .hif files; Android and desktop software tend to write .heif; iPhones write .heic. Underneath, all three are the same ISO container, almost always carrying HEVC-compressed images, so this tool treats them identically: the file's real structure is detected from its bytes and one decoder handles the entire batch. Everything runs locally in your browser, which matters for camera originals you have not published anywhere yet. The output is a standard JPG that any client, editor or upload form accepts. If your files all come from an iPhone, the HEIC to JPG page covers that case in depth, and HEIC to PNG is the lossless alternative.
Common questions
What is the difference between HEIF and HEIC?+−
HEIF is the container standard, defined by ISO as ISO/IEC 23008-12, and it can hold images compressed with several different codecs. HEIC is specifically the HEVC-compressed flavor of HEIF, the variant Apple made famous on the iPhone. In practice the terms overlap heavily: nearly every .heif or .hif file in the wild also uses HEVC compression, which is why one decoder handles them all.
Why can't Windows open the .hif files from my Sony camera?+−
Sony and Canon cameras write HEIF stills with the .hif extension, and Windows does not associate that extension with its HEIF support, which itself requires an HEVC codec that Microsoft sells separately. So the file sits there with a blank icon even though it is a perfectly ordinary HEIF image. Converting to JPG sidesteps the codec and extension problems at once.
Is quality lost when converting HEIF to JPG?+−
A small amount, since JPG is lossy, but at the default 90% quality the difference is not visible in normal viewing. Keep in mind the HEIF itself was already lossy-compressed by the camera, so the JPG preserves the photo as it exists. If you need a bit-exact copy of the decoded pixels, convert to PNG instead, at the cost of much larger files.
Do .heif, .hif and .heic files need different tools?+−
No. All three are the same ISO container, differing mainly in the extension the manufacturer chose: Apple uses .heic, Sony and Canon use .hif, and Android and some software use .heif. This tool inspects the file's actual structure, ignores the extension, and runs everything through the same decoder, so you can mix all three in one batch without sorting them first.