heic2jpg 2.2.0

Fast HEIC to JPEG converter.

heic2jpg

heic2jpg is a fast HEIC to JPEG converter designed to resolve the compatibility gap between iPhone image files and common desktop workflows. Conversion runs in parallel across worker threads using pillow-heif for fast, in-process decoding in macOS, Linux or Windows.

🚀 Installation

1. Install the uv package manager with the official installer (or brew install uv on macOS / Linux).

2. Install the tool:

uv tool install heic2jpg

📖 Usage

Convert a single file:

heic2jpg path/to/photo.HEIC

Convert all files in directory:

heic2jpg path/to/photo/album

Convert all files in current directory:

heic2jpg

Convert all files in current directory preserving metadata and timestamps:

heic2jpg -mt

Other options:

  -q, --quality [1-100] Target quality (default: 30)
  -m, --metadata        Preserve EXIF metadata
  -t, --times           Preserve source file timestamps
  -k, --keep            Keep originals (default: delete after conversion)
  -R, --recursive       Recurse into subdirectories when a directory is given
  -f, --force           Overwrite existing .jpg outputs

📊 Performance

pillow-heif's C code releases the Python's GIL during HEIF decode and JPEG encode. The default ThreadPoolExecutor therefore gets full CPU parallelism with no per-worker process startup cost. That offers over 6x the speed of traditional ImageMagick workflows.

Version	Backend	100 files
heic2jpg 2.0.0	pillow-heif	~2.5s
heic2jpg 1.1.0	ImageMagick	~15.5s

Note: absolute throughput will vary with CPU and disk speed.