An Estimated Half a Million-Plus U.S. Searches a Month Look for a Way to Convert Image Files Back to JPEG

Keyword data from Ahrefs, compiled by FormatDrop, puts seven common "convert it back" queries at an estimated 605,000 U.S. searches a month.

NEW YORK, NY, UNITED STATES, August 20, 2026 /EINPresswire.com/ -- The image formats got better. The experience of using them did not. Keyword data from Ahrefs, compiled by FormatDrop, a browser-based file converter, shows that seven of the most common "convert it back" queries — turning HEIC, WebP and AVIF files into JPEG, PNG, GIF or PDF — together draw an estimated 605,000 U.S. searches every month. The single query "heic to jpg" accounts for roughly 218,000 of that total.

The fragmentation has a clear timeline. Since iOS 11 in 2017, every iPhone from the 7 onward has saved photos in HEIC by default — a format based on the HEIF standard that Apple says stores photos at about half the size of an equivalent JPEG. Websites moved the same direction: according to the 2024 Web Almanac published by the HTTP Archive, which parsed more than 10 million pages, JPEG's share of the images it found fell eight percentage points in two years, from 40 percent to about 32 percent, while WebP reached 12 percent and AVIF, though still around 1 percent, turned up almost four times more often than two years earlier.

The receiving end never caught up. Older Windows versions cannot open HEIC photos without add-on codecs. Upload forms, government portals, printing services and legacy software frequently accept only JPEG or PNG. The search pattern is what a broken hand-off looks like from the outside: a phone or a website hands users a modern, efficient file, the destination often will not take it, and the search box becomes the workaround. The volumes show the scale of the workaround; they do not show which destination refused the file. Beyond "heic to jpg," the monthly U.S. estimates include roughly 149,000 for "webp to png," 103,000 for "webp to jpg," 42,000 for "heic to png," 37,000 for "avif to jpg," 30,000 for "heic to pdf" and 26,000 for "webp to gif."

"Nobody chooses HEIC or WebP — your phone or the website chooses it for you, and the place you're sending the file refuses it," said the FormatDrop team. "The formats themselves are genuinely better: smaller files, same quality. What's broken is the hand-off. Until every form, printer and desktop app reads the new formats, conversion is the toll users pay for other people's technical decisions — and it shouldn't cost your privacy."

FormatDrop handles these conversions directly in the browser: the conversion engines run inside the user's browser tab, so files are never uploaded to a server and no file contents leave the device. FormatDrop is free to use with no account required and no sign-up wall: free image conversions carry a repeating formatdrop.com watermark and run in batches of up to five files at 10 MB each, and a $9.99-per-month Pro tier removes the watermark, lifts the batch limit and raises the per-file cap to 500 MB. Free or paid, the file handling is identical — no file leaves the browser tab. The converter covers image, audio, video and document formats.

Methodology: the search figures are Ahrefs estimates of monthly U.S. search volume for each query, all seven pulled on August 20, 2026. They are modelled estimates of query volume, not counts of searches performed and not counts of people — one person converting a photo library may search several times. The format-share figures come from the media chapter of the 2024 Web Almanac, the most recent edition to include one.

FormatDrop is available at https://formatdrop.com.

About FormatDrop
FormatDrop is an online file converter that runs entirely in the browser — images, audio, video and documents — with no file uploads and no account required. Conversion is free; free image output carries a formatdrop.com watermark and is limited to five files of 10 MB each. A $9.99-per-month Pro subscription removes the watermark, lifts the batch limit and raises the per-file cap to 500 MB.

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