iPhone: How to convert your HEIC photos

Since iOS 11 your iPhone saves photos in the High Efficiency Image Format (HEIF) with the HEIC extension.

However, after accessing your iPhone - by following the steps outlined in @Mrkvonic 's article - and copying those photos to your hard disk, you'll probably find that you cannot open them - unless I missed an image viewer which is able to do it.

Fortunately there is an open-source tool which converts HEIC images. Just download the newest .tar.gz file and extract tifig to a folder in your $PATH, e.g. /usr/bin.

Now you can easily convert a HEIC image to a JPG image by executing:

Code:

tifig -v -p image.heic output.jpg

But what can you do if you have hundreds of HEIC images which you want to convert? Converting them one by one is a bit arduous. That's why I created a small script which I called heicconvert and does the work for you:

Code:

#!/bin/bash
for f in *; do
tifig -v -p "$f" "${f%.*}.jpg"
done

Save that script in ~/bin and make it executable. cd to the folder where your HEIC images are saved and execute heicconvert. Ready!

 

I have not noticed the heif issue. On the test iPhone (6s + iOS 11) I have, the photos are regular jpegs.
Mrk

 

This article suggests that you probably chose "Most compatible" in the settings.

 

To be honest, I didn't play with any settings - except disable those ugly 2-sec videos that are also recorded when you take stills.
Mrk

 

Neither did I (as far as I can remember). But perhaps the update to iOS 11 did it on some devices (I have an iPhone 7).