When we are familiar with JPEG, PNG, and GIF image formats, it’s not that these three image formats only exist for stuffing data into pixels making it look like an image. With smartphones in the modern days capturing too many photos, it is important to create more space for the new ones. To have more room for photos, HEIC or High-Efficiency Image Compression is one of the newest formats smartphones use to capture photos. 

HEIC images are thus smaller in size, without impacting quality. While these are great, one big downside of HEIC is, that the image format is not supported natively on Windows. Even though smartphones are smart enough to convert these images to JPEG while sharing or transferring, things don’t work that way all the time. Say for example, while sending images as documents using WhatsApp, to maintain the initial detail of the photos. That said, today I will talk about how to view HEIC images on Windows for free. 

So, without any further delay, let’s get started with how to open HEIC images on a Windows computer. 

Opening HEIC on Windows

Once you have got your hands on some HEIC images on your Windows PC, that is not going to open up on the Photos app, or any of the other popular image viewing applications.

Click on the following link to open the download page for HEIC Image Viewer from the Microsoft Store.

Once it is ready to use, right-click on the HEIC image, hover over to ‘Open with’, and hence click on ‘HEIC Image Viewer’.

If you often deal with HEIC images, click on ‘Always’, and whenever you try to open a HEIC image, it will open with HEIC Image Viewer.

Now the HEIC image will open in its full glory.

There’s not much that you can do to open the image. You can zoom in and out of the image, rotate the image, and delete the image from your drive. 

So, that’s all about how you can open HEIC images on Windows for free. Do you have any questions? Feel free to comment on the same below.