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!
Since there is no answer, I am sharing the best solution I have found - the PhotoSync app in AppStore. Has a few glitches but overall the best solution I found in two weeks of active search.

The transfer is wireless and initiated from the phone. There is a Windows companion app to receive the photos (and other possibilities such as SFTP).