This is not a coincidence, Apple purposefully make it painful to use anything with any of their products unless it’s one of their products
This is not an Apple thing. Android phones use HEIC by default as well. This is a good thing. HEIC uses smaller file sizes and has fewer artifacts than JPEG.
None of my 3 Android phones used HEIC by default.
Which phones and how old are they?
Someone tried to send me a picture they took and it looked like hot garbage until they sent it over email. Not because it couldn’t be sent without feeding it through a potato first, because Apple wants a worse experience for anyone not in their ecosystem.
When they are the oddball in the group though, it just makes iPhone’s look like a worse option.
For W10, you install an app to get the codec, then you’re done. It’s built in on W11. Same as HEVC video which is used very commonly in piracy. Are pirates out to make it “purposefully painful” or are they just using modern codecs? Android also can save to HEIC or AVIF.
Yeah it’s a bit of a tossup between them. Apple definitely chose it to be a dick. However, Microsoft could rectify it easily if they wanted to.
Both HEVC and HEIC thought cost money, and the vast majority of windows users will never use the codecs. Including the license with every copy of Windows is added cost to the end user that they receive no benefit from, so I understand why they would leave it out. HEVC prompts you if you try to play to go to the store and buy the license, which is good for your entire account. Honestly it’s not a terrible thing to do. I was one of the 1% of people who would play HEVC natively on Windows, so yeah the $3 license made sense
Apple definitely chose it to be a dick.
What other image format supports HDR and modern compression algorithms? AVIF also requires a special codec. This is just codec stuff, I really don’t see it as anyone being a dick. Android can also use these modern formats, with the same requirements if you want to open them on Windows.
Kinda surprising to me that people so frequently recommend using Linux here, yet taking 30 seconds to install a free codec on Windows is apparently a big deal.
I literally said it was easy to do.
Answer the question
What other image format supports HDR and modern compression algorithms that don’t require a license?
There, ftfy. You answer the question.
I dunno, JPEG XT maybe? At a loss here.
Why did Android also use HEIC, did they choose this just to be a dick like Apple?
Leaving aside that this one is Microsoft’s fault, how is it painful? Do you even have an iPhone? And if so, how often do you move images to your PC from it, without those images going through an intermediary service?
How many browsers open it natively?
Only Safari.
Not sure if it works for HEIC, but here’s a tip for converting WEBP (common on websites) to a more universal format like PNG:
1: open Paint
2: open .WEBP in paint
3: save as -> PNG
4: give name and saveThere’s also a Firefox extension that I use that that lets you just save as PNG https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/save-webp-as-png-or-jpeg/
Have you got compatibility turned on in the photos app?
I didn’t take the photos.
Here’s $0 kid, buy yourself a better operating system. All the others come with HEIC support.
Get work to implement it.
You just have to get them to support a free image viewer that also supports HEIC, not impossible.
Possibly Linux?
Not the time, not the place. As a Linux user seriously no, just no. People like you are the reason Linux users are seen as unhelpful and toxic, this is a codec issue not an OS issue.
Read my username
It is for the memes
Hmm, maybe they should try Linux then. Solve both the codec and the OS problem.
Yeah I hate this too - one of my clients regularly supplies images as HEIC files and they are always crappy to work with. Plus the images just seem much lower quality, which is a problem when they are being used for professional purposes.
It’s your imagination.
Maybe they’re doing something else to their files then, but seriously they are grainy as hell.
It might be something wrong with the camera or phone they used, but the format is solid.
Maybe, although it’s multiple people, so seems like it wouldn’t be a camera fault.
Possibly it’s how they are getting to me - I don’t get them directly, they come to via someone else, and I think the someone else may be getting them via WhatsApp (which I don’t use).
So in fact it’s maybe the compression from WA, rather than an issue with HEIC? I should have thought of that before!
I’m sure you don’t need telling, but just in case, I would check the meta data to see when the last time the file was edited. If it matches when they sent it to you, that’s the cause.
I can use HEIC on Arch (btw) just fine. As I recall there’s some bullshit you need to download on the Microsoft store to get it to work. It’s a pain in the ass.
As much as I love to hate on apple, any of this format shit is 100% Windows bullshit. It’s not just pictures, with shit like webm, or some random video codecs it’ll ask you to FUCKING BUY! But even shit like Windows only supporting some like 3 file formats from the god knows how many out there. Ever since I switched to Linux (heck, even fucking MacOS would do better) all this stopped being an issue. Fuck windows for literally only supporting their special selection of formats. There’s a good reason why the first step of many people installing windows is also Installing VLC or MUCH superior image viewers. Because Microsoft chooses to not support most things out there!
How many distros support h264/265 out of the box? They probably don’t support most HEIC images either since they’re HEVC on the inside
