Question: I need to transfer iPhone live photos, saved in HEIC, to my Windows PC. When I try to copy the photos in explorer, they get automatically transcoded to JPEG which I don't want (double lossy compression). How do I access the original photos?

I tried Dropbox which offers the HEIC photos but not the "live" videos. I tried Google Photos which sometimes offers HEIC and sometimes JPEG. Is there a simple non-cloud way?

Answer: 
there's a way to prevent automatic conversion from HEIC to JPEG in Windows Explorer by changing *Transfer to Mac our PC* setting on the iPhone: go to Settings -> Photos and select *Keep originals*
[transfer HEIC photos as HEIC](https://i.stack.imgur.com/KfkQZ.jpg)

Now, the question is, how to easily view these files on Windows that doesn't natively support the format yet. You could go ahead and find an online or an offline converter from .heic to .jpg (google search results are truly abundant). But this sort of defeats the purpose of transferring the original HEIC photos in the first place and eats up your disk space.

I think a much more elegant solution is to download a free plugin called CopyTrans HEIC for Windows and then browse your HEIC photos in Windows Explorer just as you do with any other type of images. It's as close to native support for Windows as it can get: once the plugin is installed, you can see all the thumbnails, open HEIC pics with Windows Photo Viewer, send them to print or insert them to a MS Office document.

More info here: <https://www.copytrans.net/copytransheic/>
Hope this helps!
Microsoft's own Photos app native on Windows 10, will import HEIC pictures in two separate files : the .HEIC file (pixel data) and the .AAE file (picture edits metadata).

Click on the `Import` button in the upper right corner and then choose `From a USB device`.

**Note**: It is well known that the .AAE file contains the metadata that describes the edits made to the picture after it has been taken from within the iOS Photos app (crop, resize, filters, etc.). But on top of that, from what I found that file also contains the filtering made by the iOS Camera app camera shooting in the Portrait camera mode. That means that if you open the .HEIC file in a proper photo editor like GIMP, and the picture was originally taken in the Portrait mode, it will show as a regular picture i.e. you will not see the added focus that you see when you look at that same picture in the iOS Photos app.