Why Your Phone Photos Will Not Open on Your Computer

Smartphones are moving away from JPEG as the default, with HEIC, WebP, and AVIF creating compatibility problems on older computers and services.

JPEG remains common for photos, while PNG is better for graphics and transparency, and GIF is mainly for short animations.

Converting between lossy formats can further reduce image quality, so it matters to choose the right format for sharing, backup, or archiving.

Newer formats save space, but users should check support in Windows, macOS, email tools, and web services before sending photos.