Convert HEIC images to JPG

Dec 6, 2018 imagemagick homebrew mac command-line

My wife needed to upload a couple hundred pictures, from her Mac, to an online service that makes photo albums. The service didn’t accept images with the .heic extension, so she needed to convert them to .jpg. This would take many hours to do one-by-one, so thankfully ImageMagick supports conversion of HEIC images. Here’s how to do it.

Install Homebrew

First, install Homebrew, which is a popular package manager for Mac.

/usr/bin/ruby -e "$(curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Homebrew/install/master/install)"

Install ImageMagick

Next, install ImageMagick from Homebrew.

brew install --with-libheif imagemagick

Convert the images from HEIC to JPG

Finally, convert your images. This command will leave the original .heic image, then make a new .jpg image with the same name.

mogrify -format jpg *.heic

Delete original HEIC images

Optionally, delete the original .heic images.

rm *.heic