HEIF vs HEIC — Are They the Same Thing?

If you’ve poked around photo formats for more than a minute, you’ve seen both HEIF and HEIC thrown around — sometimes as if they’re the same thing, sometimes as if they’re rivals. The confusion is understandable, because the truth is somewhere in between. Here’s the plain-English version.

The one-sentence answer

HEIF is the standard; HEIC is Apple’s version of it. Every HEIC file is a HEIF file, but not every HEIF file is a HEIC file.

That’s really the whole story. Everything below just explains why.

What HEIF actually is

HEIF stands for High Efficiency Image File Format. It’s a container standard developed by the MPEG group — the same organization behind video standards like MPEG-4. A container is like a box: it defines how images, thumbnails, metadata, depth maps, and even short image sequences are packed together and labeled inside a single file.

Crucially, HEIF doesn’t dictate exactly how the image data inside is compressed. It’s flexible enough to hold images compressed with different codecs.

What HEIC actually is

HEIC stands for High Efficiency Image Container. It’s Apple’s specific implementation of HEIF, with two defining choices:

• The images inside are compressed using HEVC (H.265).
• The files use the .heic extension.

When Apple adopted this format as the iPhone default in iOS 11 (2017), it branded its flavor “HEIC.” So when most people say “HEIC,” they really mean “the HEIF files my iPhone produces.”

So why two names?

Think of it like this analogy:

• HEIF is “soda” — the general category.
• HEIC is “Coca-Cola” — a specific branded product within that category.

A HEIC file is a HEIF file in the same way a Coke is a soda. The reverse isn’t guaranteed: a .heif file from a non-Apple device might use a different codec inside, even though it follows the same container rules.

In day-to-day use, this distinction almost never matters. The .heic and .heif extensions hold the same kind of data, come from the same family, and are opened and converted the same way.

Do you ever need to care about the difference?

For 99% of people, no. Here’s when it might come up:

• File extensions look different. Your iPhone exports .heic; some Android phones or cameras may export .heif. Both are normal.
• A tool only lists one. Some apps say “HEIC support” and others say “HEIF support.” In practice, a tool that handles one almost always handles the other, because they’re the same underlying format.
• Troubleshooting. If a file won’t open, knowing both names helps you search for the right fix.

If you’re new to all of this, our explainer on what a HEIC file is covers the format from the ground up.

How to open or convert HEIF and HEIC files

The good news is you don’t need to treat them differently. Both open natively on modern Apple devices. On Windows or Android, the simplest fix is the same for both: convert the file to a universal format.

Because HEIC is just a specific type of HEIF, any converter that handles .heic will normally handle .heif too. Our HEIC to PNG converter turns either one into a lossless PNG right in your browser — nothing is uploaded, so your photos stay on your device. If you’d rather have a smaller, universally compatible file, the HEIC to JPG converter does the same job and produces standard JPGs.

The bottom line

HEIF and HEIC are not quite the same, but they’re family. HEIF is the open container standard; HEIC is Apple’s HEVC-compressed version of it with the .heic extension. For everything that matters in practice — opening, viewing, converting — you can treat them identically. If a file ends in either .heif or .heic, our HEIC to PNG converter turns it into a format that opens anywhere — right in your browser, nothing uploaded.