Why your iPhone photos are “weird files”
Since iOS 11, iPhones save photos as HEIC (High Efficiency Image Container) by default. It's a genuinely better format — roughly half the file size of JPEG at the same quality — but a decade later, plenty of web tools and Windows apps still don't read it. The usual advice is a chain of workarounds: email the photo to yourself, run it through a converter app, or change a camera setting and lose the storage savings.
The direct route
Drop the .heic file straight into Cutaway — from AirDrop, iCloud Drive, a USB transfer, wherever it lives. No renaming, no pre-conversion.
The decoding happens in your browser. On Safari, the browser reads HEIC natively. On Chrome, Edge, or Firefox, Cutaway quietly loads a small open-source HEIC decoder and converts the photo locally — the file is never uploaded for conversion, which is how most “free HEIC converter” sites work (and how your photos end up on their servers).
Cut, refine, export. From here it's a normal photo: the AI removes the background, you can touch up edges with the Refine brush, and export as PNG (transparency), JPG, or WEBP.
HEIC questions, quickly answered
Does the quality suffer?
No. The local conversion decodes the full-resolution image losslessly into memory before processing. Your export resolution matches your original.
What about Live Photos and portrait mode?
The still frame works fine. Depth data from portrait mode isn't used — the AI computes its own subject mask, which is usually more precise at edges than the phone's depth map anyway.
Should I just switch my iPhone to JPEG?
If HEIC regularly blocks your workflow elsewhere: Settings → Camera → Formats → “Most Compatible.” You'll trade away about half your photo storage efficiency. If background removal was the only blocker, you no longer need to.
The privacy angle most converters hide
Search “HEIC to JPG converter” and nearly every result is a website that uploads your photo to a server, converts it, and serves it back. The photos people most often need to convert — family shots, IDs, documents, screenshots — are exactly the ones you'd least want sitting in a stranger's temp folder. Cutaway's conversion and background removal both run on your device; the page's live privacy monitor shows zero bytes of image data leaving.
Try it on your own photo — right now, right here
Cutaway runs the AI in your browser. Free, unlimited, full resolution, no watermark, no account — and your photo never leaves your device.
Remove a background free →