This means when you view photos on Windows via, you are actually viewing HEIC images, which can’t be viewed outside iCloud on Windows. but HEIC’s compatibility with Windows operating systems is still found wanting: you can’t view HEIC images on Windows PC due to its lack of support for HEIC format. Naturally, iCloud usually saves your photos in HEIC format if you didn't change the default photos setting. TO protect photos from loss, lots of users will backup iPhone photos to iCloud. The best advantage of HEIC is its ability to restore images at half the size of JPEG without compromising image quality, which largely helps to save the device's storage. Since the release of iOS 11, Apple has made HEIC the default storage format on iDevices.
HEIC stands for high-efficiency image coding, which is an efficient format developed by Apple for storing images with high quality.
