what to do with HEIC files?

what to do with HEIC files?

for better or worse, we're largely an Apple household. myself, I lean towards open source toolsets where possible, but for keeping 6 people rolling and connected, and having time left over to do anything else, iPhones and Macbooks it is.

that means we end up with a lot of .heic files. until recently, I've just been stockpiling them. support outside of the Apple ecosystem has been slow to materialize, so HEIC doesn't seem like the best target for presentaion but, I have no idea what to convert them to. the HEIF format is a modern container format that blows the socks off of JPEG, both in features and, when combined with the HEVC encoding standard, compression ratio. I'm not a photographer or an illustrator. I don't work with RAW image formats regularly and I don't have strong opionions about what's wrong with JPEGs. I do generally want to hold on to my memories however, without loosing quality as I standarize. so, it's time to try to learn a little bit about this format and how best to handle it for archival and presentation.

Error: Patent Encumberance

you don't have to read far before you start to hear rumblings about patent issues with open source tools trying to work with HEIC. licensing fees are fine for the Apples and the Googles of the world but, they're a wrench for the gears for anyone trying to build FOSS toolsets.

just take a look at the number of issues referencing "HEIF" in the GitHub repo for Sharp, a popular Javascript image maniuplation library. the maintainer does a great job of guiding users to the appropriate documation for compiling their own libraries but must repeatedly point out that:

Support for patent-encumbered HEIC images using hevc compression requires the use of a globally-installed libvips compiled with support for libheif, libde265 and x265.

Open Formats To The Rescue

luckily, it's 2024 and there are alternatives. AVIF, the royalty free image file format uses the AV1 coding format in a an heif container. it boast features and compression comprable HEIC and can be bundled with your software without fear of patent litigation.

at this point AVIF is supported by most major browsers and is supported on both MacOS and iOS as of versions 13 and 16 respectively. now, Apple isn't likely to make the jump from HEIC to AVIF any time soon but as I'm looking for a consistent standard for presenting my photo archive, it starts looking pretty good.