How to Open a HEIC File on Windows

Windows cannot open a HEIC file out of the box because it does not include a decoder for the format. Installing Microsoft's free HEIF Image Extension fixes viewing; converting the photos fixes everything else.

The short answer

To view them:

1. Open the Microsoft Store and search for HEIF Image Extension.
2. Install it. It is free and takes about ten seconds.
3. Double-click your HEIC photo. Windows Photos opens it.

To actually use them — in an editor, an upload form, an email, or anywhere that is not Windows Photos — convert them:

1. Open Image Converter in PhotoTray.
2. Drop in the whole import folder.
3. Choose JPG, and pick where the results go.

PhotoTray checks for the extension on first run and links you straight to it if you need it, rather than waiting for a conversion to fail.

Why this happens at all

Every iPhone since 2017 saves photos as HEIC by default. Apple adopted it because it stores a photo in roughly half the space of an equivalent JPG at the same visible quality, which on a phone full of photos is a substantial difference.

Windows did not follow. HEIC is built on HEVC, a patent-encumbered codec, and Microsoft ships the decoder as a separate Store extension rather than including it in Windows. On many PCs from a manufacturer it is already installed as part of an OEM media package. On a clean install, a self-built machine, or a work laptop with a locked-down image, it very often is not.

So you end up in a household with an iPhone and a Windows PC where the photos transferred perfectly and cannot be opened. That is not a fault in your setup. It is a seam between two ecosystems that have no particular incentive to close it.

The extension fixes viewing, not using

This is the part most guides skip, and it is the part that matters.

Installing the HEIF Image Extension teaches Windows to decode HEIC. Windows Photos will show your pictures, and File Explorer will show thumbnails. That is genuinely useful and it is worth doing.

What it does not do is make HEIC files work anywhere else. The photo editor you use, the marketplace you are listing on, the print service, the forum, the form at your insurer, the relative you are emailing — none of them gained the ability to read HEIC because you installed a Windows extension. Most of them will still refuse the file.

For anything beyond looking at the photo on your own machine, you need it in a format that everything reads. That means converting it.

Converting a whole import, not one photo

The other thing most guides skip: you do not have one HEIC file. You have three hundred and forty of them, because that is what a phone transfer produces.

Free web converters handle three at a time, cap the file size, and ask you to upload the lot. For a holiday's worth of family photos that is both slow and a decision about privacy that nobody consciously made.

Converting locally has no count limit and no size cap, because there is no server involved. Drop the folder in, get the folder back.

And once it is set up, it can keep doing it: point PhotoTray at whichever folder your phone imports into, and every HEIC that arrives is already a JPG by the time you look for it. That is the difference between fixing this once and stopping it from being a problem.

Keep the dates

A HEIC from a phone carries EXIF metadata — when the photo was taken, which way up it was, what the camera settings were, and often where you were standing.

A careless conversion drops all of it, and you end up with a folder of JPGs that your photo software sorts by the date you converted them rather than the date you took them. That is very annoying and very hard to undo.

PhotoTray reads the EXIF from the original and writes it into the JPG, so the chronology survives. If you would rather the location did not survive — because the photos are going on a marketplace listing, say — Privacy Scrub removes just that and keeps the rest.

What about the "codec missing" error?

If PhotoTray tells you the HEIC decoder is not available, that is the HEIF Image Extension being absent. Install it from the Store link the app gives you and come back — no restart is needed, and PhotoTray re-checks automatically.

If a specific file still fails after that, it is the file rather than the codec. Corrupt or partially-transferred HEICs are common after an interrupted phone transfer, and re-copying that photo from the phone usually resolves it.