What HEIC is, and why it causes trouble
Since 2017, iPhones have saved photos as HEIC (also called HEIF) by default. It’s a good format: a HEIC photo looks as good as a JPG at about half the file size. The trouble is everything outside Apple’s world. Windows needs an extra add-on to open it, some Android phones can’t show it, and many upload forms reject it outright.
So you take a photo of a document on your iPhone, send it to a Windows laptop or pick it in an upload form, and you get “invalid file type”. This page turns those photos straight into a PDF, on any device, without converting them to JPG first.
How it opens on different devices
- On an iPhone, iPad or Mac in Safari, the browser already understands HEIC, and we use it.
- On Windows, Android, Chrome or Firefox, we load our own HEIC reader, only when a HEIC file arrives. It runs on your device like the rest of the page, so the photos still aren’t uploaded.
Either way, each photo is saved into the PDF once, as a high-quality JPG, the right way up.
Resolution
A 12 MP iPhone photo goes in at full resolution. Newer iPhones can take 24 or 48 MP photos, and those are brought down to 16 MP, because iPhone browsers can’t draw anything bigger. That’s still about 400 DPI on an A4 page, well beyond what a printer or a form needs.
iPhone settings that avoid HEIC trouble
If you often send photos to Windows computers or forms, two settings help. Both are in the iPhone’s Settings app:
- Camera › Formats › Most Compatible makes the camera save JPG instead of HEIC. Photos take more space on the phone.
- Photos › Transfer to Mac or PC › Automatic converts photos to JPG when they’re copied to a computer by cable.
Neither changes photos you’ve already taken. For those, use this page.
Mixing with other images
You can drop HEIC photos together with JPG, PNG and screenshots. Each one becomes a page, in the order you drag them. Images to PDF lists every format that works.
Afterwards
A PDF of iPhone photos is big, often several megabytes per photo. If the PDF is for an upload form, Compress PDF brings it down to the size the form asks for, and the 200 KB page shows what that looks like.
Checked against the tool on 22 October 2026. How we write and test these guides