I don't use my mobile phone for serious photography but I do often take personal images, videos and quick overviews of landscape scenes when making long exposures for instance.

But I know that so many do use mobiles for photography, often it's their main or only camera, but the file formats being used now can pose problems for some computers and programs.

One in particular is the HEIC or HEIF format.

HEIC, or High Efficiency Image Container, is a relatively new image file format that was developed by the Moving Picture Experts Group (MPEG). It's also known as HEIF (High Efficiency Image Format), and HEIC is the file extension for image files stored in HEIF.

HEIC was introduced in 2015 by the MPEG. It's a part of MPEG-H Part 12 (ISO/IEC 23008-12) and was largely popularised by Apple, who started using it as the default format for photos on iOS 11 and macOS High Sierra in 2017, replacing the JPEG format.

Advantages of HEIC Over JPEG:

1.  Size Efficiency: The most significant advantage of HEIC over JPG is its superior compression. HEIC images are typically half the file size of JPG images at the same quality level. This means you can store twice as many photos in the same amount of space.
2.  Support for More Features: Unlike JPEG, the HEIC format supports 16-bit color depth, as compared to JPEG's 8-bit. This results in a wider range of colors and greater color accuracy. HEIC also supports transparency like PNGs and can store image sequences, similar to GIFs. Furthermore, it can store additional data like burst photos, live photos, or image editing settings within the same file.
3.  Lossless Compression: HEIC also supports lossless image compression, meaning no image quality is lost when the image is compressed.

Disadvantages of HEIC Over JPEG:

1.  Compatibility: Not all operating systems, applications, or devices support HEIC natively. For example, older versions of Windows or Android do not support it without additional software. However, newer versions of these platforms and many modern web browsers have begun to include native support.
2.  Conversion Issues: Because of the lack of universal support, you may frequently need to convert HEIC images to JPEGs or other formats, which can be an additional hassle.
3.  Processing Power: The better compression algorithms in HEIC require more processing power to encode and decode. This might result in slower performance on older hardware.

It's worth noting that, despite its disadvantages, the adoption of the HEIC format is growing due to its advantages, particularly in the era of high-resolution cameras and limited storage space on devices.

So how easy it is to make use of the images depends on your system, but using Photoshop it is easy to process and convert HEIC to JPG, TIFF or PSD; here's how using Image Processor in Adobe Photoshop:

1. Open Photoshop 2023
2. Click on File > Scripts > Image Processor

A window will open with lots of options, for this we simply:

1. Choose the location of your source images, it could be files already open in Photoshop or it could be a folder, here my source images are in Q:\Photos-001 (2) and I don't want to include any sub-folders this time
2. Choose the destination of your processed images, it could be the same location, like I have chosen or select another location on a different drive for instance
3. Choose the output file types, here I have chosen both JPEG and TIFF but you can choose one or both as well as adding PSD output. There are some options here, JPEG Quality, Convert Profile to sRGB etc. I didn't want to resize to specific dimensions
4. Here you can choose to run an action from your default and saved Photoshop actions, you can also add copyright information and add the ICC profile.
5. Hit Run at the top right

That's it, Photoshop will run, process the images and create the folders such as JPEG / TIFF / PSD with those files added.

You now have your HEIC images converted to other formats.

Join me in 2023, 2024 and beyond to learn how to make better images in Ireland from photographing to post-processing using Photoshop.