Viewing Apple .heic files

Ah, the joys of Apple systems. While I have encountered these conversion problems before (here), I had an interesting problem earlier this year when I was sent an email with some attached image files from an iPhone user. The image attachments were ".heic" files, and had been downsized (i.e. the images were smaller sized files so as to send easily).

The trouble was, when I downloaded these files to my Windows system, they downloaded as 'zero byte' sized files (which I didn't notice at the time). But when I headed over to the Cloud Convert website to convert the files, I got a weird message: "20250202_181443.heic is too small, please upload files larger than 1 bytes". Ohhh-kaaaay.

I went back to the files. Yep: they were indeed 0 bytes. I downloaded them again. Same deal. I tried another platform (FreeConvert): the same result. I tried to open the images directly from the email using the Microsoft Photo app, but was asked to purchase a driver for $1.50 in order to open the files. Blow that: the files may still not open after paying for the driver. There must be another way...

But there didn't seem to be. So instead I went back to the sender and asked them if others had also had problems, and did they know of another way to pass these images to me?

The next day I received another set of .heic files, but they were much larger files (3 and 4Mb). I downloaded them, and they downloaded as files of roughly the same size. Then I was able to convert them by going to https://cloudconvert.com/:

• In the Convert box, select Images | .heic in the left-hand dropdown list
• In the right-hand dropdown list, select "jpg" 
• Use the red box under the header section to upload the .heic file to be converted 
• Download the resulting file. 

So do-able once the files were appropriately sized. But still puzzling as to why this proved so awkward...

Sam