How to Insert iPhone Photos into Word & PowerPoint (Fixing Image Errors)
Updated: January 2026
It is a classic “deadline panic” moment: You are finishing a report in Microsoft Word or a presentation in PowerPoint. You try to drag and drop a photo you took with your iPhone onto the slide.
Instead of your image appearing, you see a Red X, a blank box, or an error message saying “An error occurred while importing this file.”
The issue isn’t your document—it’s the file format. Older versions of Microsoft Office (and even some newer ones) do not know how to handle Apple’s HEIC images. In this guide, we will show you how to fix this instantly so you can finish your work.
Why Won’t My Photo Load in Word?
Microsoft and Apple have a complicated relationship. While the newest versions of Office 365 on Windows 11 are getting better at reading HEIC files, millions of people (and companies) are still using Office 2016, 2019, or older enterprise versions.
These versions were built before HEIC existed. When you try to “Insert Picture,” the software expects a JPG or PNG. When it sees an HEIC, it treats it like a corrupted file.
Related Issue: This is the same reason you can’t view these files in your folders. See our guide on Opening HEIC on Windows.
The Solution: Convert Before You Insert
The fastest way to get your photo into your document is to convert it to the format Microsoft prefers: JPG.
- Go to our Home Page Tool.
- Drop the photo you want to use in the box.
- Download the JPG version.
- In Word/PowerPoint, go to Insert > Picture and select the new JPG file.
It will now load perfectly, every time.
Building a Large PowerPoint?
If you are building a slide deck with 50 photos from a site visit or event, you do not want to convert them one by one.
Also, inserting huge HEIC files can make your PowerPoint file size balloon to 500MB, making it impossible to email. Converting to JPG helps keep your presentation file size manageable.
Pro Tip: Use our Batch Conversion Tool to process all your slide images at once before you start building.
Need to send the document as a PDF?
Often, the reason you are putting photos into Word is just to create a shareable PDF document.
You can skip Word entirely. If you just need to turn a group of images into a single professional PDF, check out our sister tool FillPDFNow.com. It’s faster than formatting a Word doc.
Office & Productivity FAQ
Why does my photo look sideways in Word?
HEIC files contain “rotation data” that older versions of Word often misread. When you convert to JPG with our tool, we “bake in” the correct rotation, so your image always lands right-side up.
I’m using Google Docs, not Word. Do I still need this?
Yes. While Google Docs is web-based, if you downloaded your photos from Google Photos backup as HEIC, the browser upload might still fail or lag. JPG is always the safest format for web documents.
Can I paste an HEIC directly into Outlook emails?
If you copy/paste an HEIC file into Outlook, it often converts it to a generic icon attachment that the receiver cannot see. To ensure your image appears inline (visible in the email body), always convert to JPG first.