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Comment by bonyt | Hacker News Reader

A lot of people have already (unknowingly) produced a ton of HEIF photos. It’s the default on newer versions of iOS I believe.

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It's a great surprise to realize you've been shooting HEIFs for months and then can't open them on your MBP because you're "only" on El Capitan.

There is an option on iOS that says

TRANSFER TO MAC OR PC - Automatic - Keep Originals

Automatically transfer photos and videos in a compatible format, or always transfer the original file without checking for compatibility.

tl-dr; you can set it to automatic and when you backup via itunes the images will be jpegs

Or use this free software

https://imazing.com/heic

Or if you upload everything to Google Photos, and then realize that you can't download these pictures on windows after downloading them from Photos, because while GP supports HEIF, Windows does not.

Windows 10 has full HEIF support, but you need to install the official plugin from Microsoft separately from the store (presumably for licensing reasons).

All the default methods of transferring photos out of the iOS ecosystem will convert the photos to JPEG transparently. This is only a problem with third-party software or if you manually disable the compatibility option.

That shouldn't be a surprise, because in order for that to happen you'd have to disable the compatible export option in iOS that's on by default. Unless you used some 3rd party image transfer that wasn't as thoughtful?

The default Formats setting for the built-in camera app is "High efficiency", which saves as HEIF/HEIVC. You have to change it to "Most compatible" to use JPEG/H.264.

The default export option is ‘automatic’ which converts to jpeg when exporting to anything other than new Apple OS devices. The format for taking the photos is irrelevant.

That's in the Photos app settings. I have no idea if Google Photos does automatic conversion too.

I think someone mentioned before in this thread the syncing between Android and iPhone using Google Photos and finding the format incompatible on Android.

This has actually been a huge annoyance for me (an Android user). My wife (an iOS user) and I both use Google Photos, and we automatically can see each other's photos in our respective libraries through the `shared libraries` feature.

Her photos are all HEIF. My photos are all JPG. The Google Photos app on Android may be just about the _only_ Android app I've encountered that knows how to handle HEIF - which means any time I try to share one of my wife's photos to social media or a messaging app, it simply doesn't work. I have to convert them to JPGs on my own.

Doesn't Google Photos have an option to convert them automatically? iOS has an option to do that for any exports it does natively (sms, messages, airdrop, USB transfer etc).

I don’t understand this comment. Google Photos doesn’t support HEIF at all - the iOS app converts them to JPEG on the fly when you upload them.

Then that’s a problem that google photos should solve. iOS does this transparently. Dropbox even asks if I want to sync with heic or jpg.

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