HEIC Support

[Andrew Shinn]

Hey everyone,

So, I decided to upgrade my almost five year old iPhone to a 12. I noticed that its storing pictures in the HEIC format vs. JPEG. Using the revival, I attempted to upload these and it had no idea what to do with these and failed. It is possible to configure the phone to save as JPEG, which I have done for now.

I searched the group for HEIC, and saw no other comments and thought I'd ask what I can do to support these?

I've been using PHP Gallery since pretty much the beginning, and really appreciate the efforts to keep this alive. I am just a guy on the internet sharing pictures of my cars/motorcycles etc.

-Andrew

[Brad Dutton]

Hi,

Image support is up to the image library being used. GD & GraphicMagick don't appear to support HEIC yet but ImageMagick does. Check your ImageMagick version and verify it is built with HEIC support.

https://imagemagick.org/script/formats.php

Brad

[JR]

Andrew,

The very new HEIC format is completely unnecessary -- just what the world needs, yet *another* image format. I've never been a fan of Apple's proprietary formats and they seem to have come up with this one in an attempt to keep up up their ongoing campaign to make people believe an Apple machine is somehow "better" than any other (and so worth it's exorbitant cost). Since it is possible to configure an Apple device to save in .JPG and since there are probably already free software HEIC-to-JPG converter apps already available, there is no reason to use this format that I can see. What? Just because Apple says so? I think not. Remember, Apple is the company who decided their users didn't need standard headphone jacks in their devices anymore (without actually asking them about that).

I'm sure Apple claims that HEIC is a "better format than JPEG" -- which it may be, but we already have a public domain image format that is "better" in some ways than .JPG and that is the .PNG format, which Gallery supports. With all the other far more important things that need to be done to upgrade Gallery, adding HEIC support would have to be pretty far down the "to do" list.

-- J.R.

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[Andrew Shinn]

So I'm clear... I also am annoyed by that decision Apple made to change the default format AND removal of headphone jacks on everything from iPhones to certain Androids :) This was really me being more frustrated then anything bulk converting these images today.

Just to more/less close out this discussion, I looked into getting ImageMagick on this box up to snuff for HEIC. Long story short: there is no ImageMagick in the CentOS 8 or EPEL repo that will work "out of the box" with HEIC. So, I thought hey.. maybe I'll compile it NBD. Well... It has a LARGE number of dependent libraries that, frankly speaking, I have no desire to track down random RPM's and/or compile and maintain. The juice wasn't worth the squeeze.

I do have my iPhone set to save in JPEG for a couple weeks now, but I honestly didn't even realize they were in HEIC for quite some time. Not until I wanted to upload to my gallery. Trust me, I get the sentiment... I was very annoyed as well. Even more annoying, they backed up to my OneDrive camera roll as HEIC as well... so forever am I stuck with them like that unless I want to waste time converting those too.

I could ramble all night, but I just feel like the world is trying to make everything vastly more complex than it needs to be. Yanking the wheel around on tried & true Linux subsystems, image formats... I could list stuff out all night.

-Andrew

[JR]

Andrew,

Just so. You weren't *supposed" to realize your Apple device was defaulting to HEIC format nor was anyone else until the thing had become firmly established. I'm sure some of those dependencies you discovered in the format are for identification and tracking purposes. Sorry to sound paranoid, but like the guy in the tin hat says, "it ain't paranoia if it's true" and in a world of facial recognition surveillance the idea of millions of selfie images carrying around who knows what deep inside doesn't seem far-fetched to me ( not anymore ).

-- J.R.

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[Adrian London]

My phone takes HEIC photos, and I’ve left it on that setting.

I use Photos on my Macbook to export all my photos before uploading them to G3. The photos get exported as jpeg files so they upload fine.

There’s a setting in the phone that, even if you take the photos in HEIC, should result in them being exported as jpeg. Settings / Photos / Transfer to Mac or PC. Mine is set to “Keep Originals” as I don’t upload to G3 from my phone, but you could try changing it to “Automatic”.

As you’ve already done, changing the format the photo is actually stored in will also solve the issue. Settings / Camera / Formats. Set it to “Most Compatible”. You could always export all your HEIC photos as jpegs, delete them from Photos, and then r-import them as the resulting jpegs. Voila - no more HEICs :)

HEIC is meant to be equal quality to jpeg but with smaller files, so imo you don’t lose anything apart from some storage space by not using HEIC.