Every family has a recipe book that only exists in one copy: a stained notebook, a stack of index cards, or a folder of phone photos of your grandmother's handwritten pages. When someone finally decides to turn it into a real book — printed copies for the kids, a PDF everyone can open — the photos are the first problem. The dish photos on your iPhone are HEIC files, and most print shops, layout tools, and older relatives' computers do not know what to do with them.
HEIC is the format iPhones have used by default since iOS 11. It keeps photos small without visible quality loss, which is great for storage. But a family recipe book is a print project, and print workflows still run on JPG and PNG. Your page layout app may refuse the HEIC file outright, or worse, silently import a low-resolution preview and leave you with a blurry photo in the finished book. Converting first avoids both surprises.
Start by deciding which photos actually belong in the book. A recipe book does not need every photo you took of the dish — it needs the one shot that shows the finished plate clearly, plus maybe one of the cook at work. Pick your winners before converting anything; converting twenty near-identical shots of the same casserole wastes time and clutters your project folder.
Next, check the photos on a big screen. Open each winner on your computer and zoom in. HEIC files can hide motion blur and soft focus that look fine on a phone screen. If a photo is blurry at full size, no conversion will fix it — retake it or pick another one. The photos that survive this check are the ones worth converting.
Then convert the keepers to JPG. You can convert HEIC photos to JPG for a family recipe book right in your browser: open the tool, drop in your photos, and download the JPGs. The files never leave your device, which matters here — these are family photos, and some of them may show people who never agreed to have their pictures uploaded to a random server. No account, no watermark, and the originals stay untouched on your phone.
Once you have the JPGs, keep the two sets separate. Put the originals in a folder called recipe-book-masters and the converted JPGs in recipe-book-print. That way, if a page ever needs re-exporting at a different size, you go back to the master instead of re-converting an already-converted file. Re-converting a JPG is how photos slowly turn soft and blocky over successive edits.
A few details make the printed result much better. First, do not shrink the photos before converting — let the layout tool do the resizing, so it works from the full-resolution file. Second, check the orientation: iPhone photos sometimes carry rotation data that one app reads and another ignores, so open each JPG and confirm it is upright before you place it. Third, print a test page. One test print of a single recipe page tells you more about color and sharpness than an hour of staring at a screen.
There is one more habit worth building: write the recipe text and the photo captions together, while the memory is fresh. A photo of a dish means little without the note that the sauce needs an extra spoonful of vinegar, or that the photo was taken at the lake house in 2019. The book is the memory, not just the image.
A family recipe book is a small project with a long life — the copies you print this year will be on kitchen shelves for decades. Converting your iPhone photos to JPG first is a ten-minute step that makes the difference between a book that looks professional and one that fights you at every page.
Disclosure: I'm the developer of FileOnTap.
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