WebP vs HEIC: Web Delivery vs Apple Capture

These two formats compress to roughly the same efficiency and are almost never interchangeable, because they were built for opposite ends of an image's life.

HEIC is a capture format

Apple made HEIC the iPhone's default in iOS 11 because it halves the size of an equivalent JPEG while adding 10-bit colour, HDR, depth maps and Live Photos. It is superb at holding everything a camera captured.

WebP is a delivery format

WebP exists to get an image into a browser quickly. It carries none of HEIC's capture extras, but every browser renders it — which HEIC has never managed and, given HEVC licensing, likely never will.

Compression is roughly a wash

At matched quality the two land within a few percent of each other. Choosing between them is not a size decision.

Converting HEIC to WebP

This is the common direction and the useful one: it takes a phone photo and makes it publishable. Both are lossy so a little quality is lost on re-encode — negligible above quality 80 — and HEIC extras like Live Photo motion, depth maps and HDR are dropped.

Converting WebP to HEIC

Less common, but it has a real use: normalising web-sourced reference images into the format an Apple photo library expects, so downloads sit consistently alongside camera-roll photos.
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