# HEIC Viewer

A HEIC viewer for Windows, Android and anywhere iPhone photos will not open. Several at once, decoded in your browser. Nothing converted, nothing uploaded.

Canonical page: https://filetity.com/heic-viewer

## Capabilities

- Free: Yes, with no watermark and no page limit.
- Account required: No. There is no account system.
- Processed on device: Yes. The file is read by your browser and never uploaded. There is no server to send it to.
- Formats: HEIC and HEIF in, several at a time. Nothing out. The converters are one link away when a file is actually needed.
- Limits: The first image in the file, which is the one a person means by the photo. A HEIC can also hold a burst, a depth map or a Live Photo's video, and those are not shown.
- Mobile: Yes, on any modern mobile browser. Large files are limited by the memory the phone gives the browser.
- Offline: Yes, once the page and the decoder have loaded. The decoder is fetched once and cached.

## Questions

### Why can Windows not open my iPhone photos?

Because HEIC uses the HEVC video codec to store a still image, and HEVC is patented. Microsoft ships Windows without the decoder and sells the extension separately, and most Android makers leave it out for the same reason. The file is not broken and the photo is not damaged; the machine simply has no decoder for it.

### Does this convert my photos?

No, and that is the point of a viewer. The picture is decoded into memory and drawn on screen, and no file is created. If you need something to email or upload, the HEIC to JPG and HEIC to PNG tools produce real files and are linked under the photos.

### Can I open several at once?

Yes. Drop a whole folder's worth and they come up as a grid you can click through, which is the usual case: photos arrive from an iPhone in batches and the question is which ones are worth keeping. Each one shows its pixel dimensions and file size.

### What about Live Photos and bursts?

The still image is shown, which is what the file leads with and what everything else treats as the photo. A HEIC container can also carry the short video from a Live Photo, alternative frames from a burst, and a depth map, and none of those is displayed here.

## Related tools

- [HEIC to JPG](https://filetity.com/heic-to-jpg): Convert HEIC to JPG free, so iPhone photos open on any app or website.
- [HEIC to PNG](https://filetity.com/heic-to-png): Convert HEIC to PNG free, with no further compression loss.