What the heck is HEIC?

What the heck is a .heic file? 🤔 This question came in as an idea for a blog post from a reader and I thought yeah, I wonder about that too!  If you have a fairly new model iPhone (11+) you know just what I mean. Read on to learn more.

If you don’t use Apple products, you probably don’t care about this topic unless you are the curious sort – like me.

An example

Have you noticed your iPhone photos are stored as .heic files instead of .jpg files? I noticed this change when I transferred my phone photos to my computer to edit them in Adobe Lightroom. My transferred photos did not have .jpg filenames. They had the new .heic filenames.

In this photo I took of our sweet dog Willow,  you can see here that the file name ends in .heic. We are much more used to seeing .jpg (a.k.a. jpegs).

What is HEIC?

When we take a photo, the photo is stored on our device (phone, camera, etc.). There is a format to that file and .jpg is what we are all most used to.  Apple has starting using a new file format for photos starting with iPhones models 11+.  This format has some benefits as described below by Chatgpt – shortened up by me to what I think is most important to us.

“A HEIC file is a High Efficiency Image Format file, which is a type of file used for storing images and image sequences. HEIC offers several advantages:

1. Higher Compression Efficiency: HEIC files can store images at a higher quality while taking up less space compared to traditional formats like JPEG.
2. Support for Image Sequences: HEIC can store multiple images in a single file, making it suitable for live photos, bursts, and animated sequences.

Apple adopted HEIC as the default image format starting with iOS 11 and macOS High Sierra, making it widely used on Apple devices. However, compatibility with non-Apple devices and software might require conversion to more widely supported formats like JPEG or PNG.”

What does this mean to us?

I’ve highlighted what I feel are the most important parts in green. First, our photos are better quality and take up less space and we all know how quickly our phone memory card can fill up with photos!

Next, about live photos, bursts, and animations.  These three types of photos have something in common. They all store multiple frames (snapshots) in one image file. This is not possible in a jpg format file – known as a ‘still’ photo – just 1 snapshot in time.

A tangent – “Live” photos

Do you have your iPhone set up to take ‘live’ photos? Live photos are actually a combination of a main image and a little 3 second video including sound - of what you are taking a picture of.  

When viewing the live photo on your phone, you can press and hold on the image and you will see it run the little video.

If you like that video, you can edit the image to ‘save as video’ and voila! You have a 3 second video of the photo you just took.

You can also edit the live photo and change which frame is the “key photo” (see 2^nd image below). This means you can change which photo you see when you look at that photo on your phone. This is very handy. If you don’t like your photo, but it’s a live photo, you may very well like one of the other frames stored in that live file. I do this quick edit all the time to get the best image. I often photograph my dogs and they move a lot, so it helps me get the cutest dog photos even when they are moving. 😍

The screen shot below is of a live photo being edited on my phone.  I clicked on the little circle in a circle icon to edit the live frames and this screen came up. You can see there are a bunch of frames within this picture that I can pick from as the key frame (the image) that I see on my camera roll for this live photo.

In this photo of Willow, I could pick one of these 11 frames as the key image.

 Isn't she adorable? 

Back to what does this mean to us?

The last point that I’d like to make is about compatibility (does your device or app know what to do with an heic file?). Most times, we will not care about this but on occasion it can cause trouble. When I first got my phone years ago, I couldn’t edit .heic files on my computer using Adobe Lightroom. I could see them there, but I couldn’t edit them. I had to convert my .heic files to .jpg files (export as jpg and the import as jpg) to edit them in LR. That was no fun at all.

Adobe has now included support for editing heic files in their more recent versions of their products. Yeah!  I’m betting we won’t have this problem for long as apps catch up to using the new format. If you run into a problem, update your app to the most recent version and chances are, the problem will be fixed.

Oh, and when you email or share your heic photo from your phone, it will share as a jpg. Handy for the person receiving it. Who otherwise would say… ‘What the heck is this HEIC file?’.

Phew! That was a lot.

I hope this blog post answered your questions about ‘What the heck is HEIC?’. It’s a bit technical but I thought I’d answer the question because one of you asked!  If you have a topic you’d like featured in my blog, email me and let me know. I’d love to hear your suggestions!

Since Willow is here in this blog post, I have a freebie for you on tips for taking photos of animals! It's a short one but the tips are really useful! It will ask for your email - if you are on my email list - rest assured you will not be added twice!

Would you like to learn how you can think and see differently to improve your photography? If so, sign up for my waiting list for my online course “Take Your Best Shot: Great Photos Made Simple” and you’ll hear about it the next time I open it up for enrollment!