How to open iPhone HEIC photos on Windows

iPhone photos in HEIC format open in Paint by Zaweba on Windows. It reads HEIC and HEIF through the image codecs built into Windows, so once those are present you simply open the file like any other picture, edit it and save it as JPEG, PNG or another format. It can also save HEIC when the Microsoft extensions for it are installed.

HEIC is the format iPhones use by default because it holds a good quality photo in a smaller file than JPEG. Windows doesn't always come ready to read it, which is why a folder of photos copied from a phone can show blank thumbnails.

What you need

Paint relies on the Windows codecs for HEIC rather than its own decoder. On many Windows computers these are already installed; on others you'll need Microsoft's HEIF and HEVC extensions, which are available through Microsoft's own store. If HEIC files won't open, that's the first thing to check. Saving HEIC needs those extensions as well.

Step by step with HEIC files

Copy the photos from your phone to a folder on the PC. Open Paint, choose File > Open and select one or many files; when you pick several, each opens in its own tab. Edit as you would any photo: crop, straighten, adjust colour, retouch.

To keep a version that opens everywhere, use Save As and choose JPEG, or PNG if you need transparency or no compression loss. Give it a new name so you keep the original HEIC untouched. If you plan to come back to the edit, save a .ptx copy as well, since that is Paint's own format where layers and adjustments stay editable.

Converting a whole folder

Opening photos one at a time is slow if you've got hundreds from a holiday. File > Image Processor converts a folder, or the documents you have open, to JPEG, PNG, WebP or TIFF in one go, with a quality setting and an option to fit them within a maximum width and height. That's the easy way to make a set of JPEGs to share or upload.

For more control, Batch runs a saved action over a folder, so you can resize, sharpen and export in the same pass, with name tokens such as the date and a batch-log.txt recording what was done.

Getting a good result with HEIC files

JPEG quality matters when converting. Too low and you'll see blocky artefacts in skies; somewhere high gives files close to the original look. Keep the HEIC originals somewhere safe even after converting, since each JPEG save loses a little quality and the HEIC is your master.

Newer iPhones can capture photos with a wider range of colour than standard screens show. Paint manages colour with ICC profiles and embeds the profile when it exports, which helps the converted photo look the same on other devices.

Phone photos often carry location and date details in their metadata, so think about whether you want those shared before you send converted copies on. Paint by Zaweba is a free, offline image editor for Windows, so your phone photos stay on your own computer rather than going through an online converter.