How to Make Your iPhone Shoot JPEGs Again After iOS 11

After updating your iPhone to iOS 11, you may have noticed that your photos are all .heic files instead of the ubiquitous .jpeg. If you’re rather go back to shooting JPEG for now until you feel more ready to make the switch, it’s actually extremely easy to do.

“If you’re an iPhone and Adobe Lightroom user and have updated to iOS 11, you might want to cripple your iPhone’s image quality so Lightroom can read your stills and videos,” writes photographer Eric Cheng. Otherwise, when trying to import your iPhone photos into Lightroom, you may run into this:

To switch back from .heic (pronounced “heek”), simply open up your iPhone’s Settings and hit Camera.

In the Camera settings, tap the Formats option.

On the Formats screen, select Most Compatible instead of High Efficiency.

High Efficiency makes your camera shoot HEIF and HEVC formats, which can cut your storage in half without sacrificing image quality. The problem is, JPEG is much more universally compatible with popular photo software.

Until things catch up with Apple’s switch, you can switch to Most Compatible to continue shooting in JPEG for photos and H.264 for video, allowing you to continue using your existing workflow.

If you’d like to stick with the new efficient formats, there are free programs and websites that can help you convert .heic to .jpeg.