Bulk convert HEIC to JPG: whole folders of iPhone photos at once, on Windows or Linux

Why bulk is the hard part

Converting one HEIC photo is a solved problem. The forum threads that rank for this question are all the same shape: “Best way to convert 700 HEIC files stored on my PC into JPEG?”, “Converting 1500~ photos from HEIC to JPG”, “Is there an easy way to convert photos from HEIC to JPEG in bulk?” The answers people get are web converters with daily caps, one-photo-at-a-time apps, or “write a script”. Here’s what the common routes allow, checked on 16 Sep 2026:

A timed batch

We took 12 CC0 photos from Wikimedia Commons, encoded them to HEIC at quality 80 and about 3,840 × 2,560 px (43 MB in total, a fair stand-in for iPhone shots), and converted them to JPG at quality 90 on the site’s build machine, an 8-core AMD Ryzen 7 7700X desktop, on 16 Sep 2026, using libheif (1.21 on our machine; Simple Image Converter bundles the same library).

At the parallel rate, 700 photos is about a minute; one at a time it’s about six. The app converts in parallel by default. Your numbers will differ with your CPU and photo sizes, but the shape holds: decoding HEIC is the slow part, and it parallelises well.

The output was 31 MB of JPG from 43 MB of HEIC, because JPG at quality 90 is a little leaner than a quality-80 HEIC at the same pixel size. For the same 12 photos as PNG the output was 138 MB, which is why JPG is the right target for photos and PNG for graphics; the app’s presets pick the right one for each job.

Orientation and location data

Two things bite people who batch-convert phone photos:

Orientation. Phones save the sensor’s native orientation and write a rotation flag in the metadata. A converter that copies pixels and drops the flag produces sideways photos. Simple Image Converter always applies the EXIF orientation to the pixels, so portrait shots come out upright.

Location. iPhone photos carry the GPS position, the device model and the time. Simple Image Converter strips EXIF, GPS and XMP by default; switch Strip metadata off if you want to keep them. We tested this on a HEIC with a GPS position written into it: the tag was present in the HEIC and absent from the converted JPG. The convert without uploading page shows the check.

The whole folder, in one window

In Simple Image Converter:

1. Drop the folder onto the window (or click Browse folder), and tick Include subfolders if the photos are sorted into months.
2. Click the iPhone photos → JPG preset. It sets JPG, quality 90, and metadata stripping.
3. Click Convert All. Files convert in parallel; a file the app can’t read is skipped with a reason and the rest carry on.
4. The summary tells you how many converted and the size before and after. Nothing is overwritten: a clash becomes name_2.jpg.

Simple Image Converter · converting

Simple Image Converter · done

It needs no Microsoft codec, it runs the same on Windows 10, Windows 11 and SteamOS/Linux, and it doesn’t upload anything. It can’t save HEIC (only open it), and it doesn’t do RAW; the app page has the full Opens / Saves table. One-time purchase on Steam, no daily caps.