HEIC In, Web Formats Out, at Full Quality
An iPhone shoots in HEIC by default. It is a good format, it produces smaller files at better quality than JPEG, and no web browser will display it. So a photo straight off a phone is one that a website cannot show without something in between.
That something is handled on upload. You pick the photo, it converts, and what lands on your site is a format every browser can display, at full quality. There is nothing to switch on and nothing to convert first.
Why not just ask people to export a JPEG
Because that is a real barrier disguised as a small one. It means opening a different app, finding an export setting, saving a second copy, and remembering where it went. In practice what happens is the photo does not get uploaded at all, and the site keeps the headshot from three years ago.
The whole point of being able to update a website from a phone is that it happens in the two minutes you actually have. Anything that adds a step to that removes the update.
Where it applies
All of it. The conversion lives in the shared upload path, so the ordinary uploader, the bulk picker and the Dropbox import all behave the same way.
Orientation is handled at the same point. Phone photos carry a rotation flag rather than being stored rotated, which is why a picture that looked upright in your camera roll can arrive sideways on a website that ignores the flag. Yours are corrected on the way in, so what you saw is what appears.
Resizing happens here too, which is covered in automatic resizing on upload. A modern phone photo is far larger than any web page needs, and sending the original to every visitor is the most common reason an image-heavy site is slow.
Once it is up
Every photo gets a caption, and photo categories keep a growing library navigable.
On choosing what to upload at all, the headshot guide and three mistakes with headshots are worth more than any technical note here.
Create a free actor website and upload straight off your phone.
