What is an HEIC photo?

You may hear HEIF or HEIC used interchangeably, but they are photos generated on phones.

It's an Apple thing isn't it?

No, HEIC files are generated on Apple and Android phones. It was created by MPEG and is called HEIF (High-Efficiency Image Format). The reason why Apple decided to call them HEIC remains unknown, but they refer to it as HEIC (High-Efficiency Image Container).

Why doesn't Microsoft support it?

In their great wisdom MPEG decided this wasn't to be an open standard; in fact, it has over 4,000 patents and if you infringe any of them without paying a license fee, you're going to get sued.

Phone manufacturers pay a license per device, but Microsoft's operating system is not device bound, you can create virtual machines, use cloud versions, or have multiple partitions etc. So the licensing model is a nightmare - hence it's not built into Windows.

So what's the problem?

On Windows, not only does the operating system not natively understand HEIC photos, but neither does most photo editing software (they would have to pay a license to MPEG as well). when you download or get given HEIC files, Windows and Editing packages can't handle them, so you need to convert them to something more compatible with the Windows world.

Is there a way to get Windows to understand HEIC photos?

Yes, on the Microsoft App Store, you can pay $0.99 to download a "codec" which allows Windows to natively read (not write) HEIC photos; unfortunately, this is not a great implementation and only provides basic, and very slow, reading of HEIC photos. The other problem is that this is only for the operating system, it does not enable applications to understand HEIC photos.

The codec also doesn't provide full access to the HEIC photo capabilities as per the MPEG standard.

What so I do then?

Generally, the best option is to convert HEIC photos to an industry standard, one that is free from patents and understood by all software; Specifically, JPEG.

Of course, JPEG is not the only file format that is universally understood, PNG is another common format, amongst others.

HEIC Converter Lite

Convert HEIC & HEIF to JPEG or PNG (for Windows 10 & 11) - Simple design, Powerful conversion

Available on the Microsoft App Store

Free Trial - try it out and see if it works for you!

[Features]

• Unlimited conversions, convert a few photos, or thousands
• Convert to JPG, JPEG or PNG
• Preserves the image metadata (Exif)
• Converts locally, so it's fast and secure and doesn't upload anything to internet
• Fully supports Hight Dynamic Range (HDR)
• Modern Windows styling on both Windows 10 and 11