HEIC vs PDF
| Property | HEIC | |
|---|---|---|
| Full name | High Efficiency Image File Format (HEIF) with HEVC compression | Portable Document Format |
| File extensions | .heic, .heif | |
| Created by | MPEG (ISO/IEC 23008-12); Apple made it the iPhone default | Adobe; an open ISO standard (ISO 32000) since 2008 |
| Introduced | 2015 (iPhone default since iOS 11, 2017) | 1993 |
| Compression | Lossy (HEVC / H.265), about half the size of a similar JPG | Mixed: text and vectors stay sharp; photos inside are usually JPG |
| Transparency | Supported, rarely used by cameras | Pages can contain transparent objects |
| Animation | Image sequences supported; Live Photos store their video separately | No |
| Typical size | About 1–2.5 MB for a 12-megapixel iPhone photo | — |
| Opens on | iPhone, iPad, Mac and Safari; Windows needs an extension; most websites and Chrome reject it | Every computer and phone; browsers have built-in viewers |
| Best for | Storing phone photos in less space | Documents that must look the same everywhere: forms, invoices, CVs |
Why convert HEIC to PDF?
Photographing paperwork with an iPhone is quick; sending it is where HEIC gets in the way. Schools, landlords, insurers and government portals almost always want a single PDF, and many of them cannot open HEIC at all. Converting the photos straight to PDF skips the extra JPG step and gives you one file to attach.
Each HEIC is decoded with a built-in libheif decoder, turned into a high-quality JPEG and placed on its own page. Photos are rotated the right way up from the orientation the iPhone recorded. For documents, A4 or Letter with a small margin looks like a scan; for photo albums, "Same size as the image" keeps each page the shape of the photo.
iPhone photos are large, so a PDF of twenty pages can reach 30–50 MB. If an upload form has a size limit, run the result through Compress PDF. Mixing formats is fine too: JPG, PNG and screenshots can go into the same PDF.