HEIC to JPG
Your photos never leave this device
HEIC is the container Apple devices use for photos by default. It stores the same picture in roughly half the space of a JPEG, but many Windows applications and older websites cannot open it. Converting to JPEG trades that efficiency for a format that everything reads.
How to convert HEIC files
Browser support is the honest limitation here. Safari on Apple hardware decodes HEIC natively because the operating system does; Chrome and Firefox do not ship the codec, largely because of the patent licensing around HEVC. Rather than downloading a two-megabyte decoder onto every visitor, this tool uses whatever the browser already has and tells you plainly when it is not there.
Questions
Because Chrome, Firefox and Edge do not include a HEIC decoder. Open the page in Safari on a Mac or an iPhone, or set your iPhone to shoot JPEG.
Settings, Camera, Formats, then choose Most Compatible. New photos are saved as JPEG; existing ones stay as they are.
A little, because JPEG re-encodes. At quality 90 the difference is not visible at normal viewing sizes, and the file will be roughly twice the size of the HEIC.
It is dropped. The photo is redrawn from its pixels, so EXIF metadata including GPS coordinates does not survive the conversion.
No. Everything happens in this page, which for holiday photographs is rather the point.