Have you got compatibility turned on in the photos app?
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
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?
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.
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.
Hmm, maybe they should try Linux then. Solve both the codec and the OS problem.
