Understanding the HEIC Format

For HN, where readers are expected to be hackers, reading that you might want to go online to convert a HEIC to something is a little bit weird. Paragraphs like this:

  The Shift to Client-Side Processing (Local Conversion)
  To solve this privacy dilemma,
  modern web development has shifted towards Client-Side Processing.
  This means the conversion software runs entirely
  inside your web browser using your device's own hardware,
  without ever transmitting the file over the internet.

makes me cringe. Local conversion is not when you open a conversion website in your browser monstrosity that runs JavaScript locally. Local conversion is when you use ImageMagick to convert a file from any format to any format locally, without launching a browser, completely unnecessary for this purpose.

    As camera resolutions increase and storage space becomes more valuable, the HEIC format is here to stay.

Maybe in the same sense that BMP and TIF are here to stay, because someone uses them occasionally. I doubt anything will ever replace JPEG, except maybe JPEG-XL, but only in the same sense that C++ has replaced C, where only a small percentage of the difference is ever used.

I grapple with image posts every day (obviously not here). Sites do not display webp, so I end up converting either with an app [1] or browser extension. Converting on an iPhone is absolutely insane [0]. And I don't have a clue who can read heic, so I ban it on everything I own.

And then the URLS that social sites don't render as graphics. Some sites are small and don't have the resources of a Google to somehow display images with URL's that look like random strings with no extension.

[0] Without detail, You save an image to photos (no option to save them to Files), then share to Files, Open Files, long press to get the "Quick Actions" menu, and "Convert Image". THEN save it back to photos.

Fun? Well, when you "get info" on an ios photo, if it's webp, there is NO info.

This is user-hostile to say the least.

[1] There's a binary you can get from Google, IIRC, that converts webp. I call it in a shell script that can batch-convert unlimited webp files in one shot.

Understanding that vendor-by-vendor, your Windows 11 PC may, or may not be able to handle these images because for a $1 bundling licence fee, some people cheaped out.

And hand-installing the algo code is a tiresome one time process with if-but-maybe (no, it is not as simple as clicking on and paying for the licence frobs on the MS Store)

The comment flows online about this are classic. "Apple did this to us all" against "Why should I buy s/w licences I don't need" (as if you don't have a tonne of licences in your soft and firmware as-is to a variety of people) against "This format isn't any better anyway" against "Isn't this just about the video streams" against "Is this what those motion video sequences are from Apple" (no, thats different, even if encoded in HEIC...

Guys, enough already. Just pay a one-time somewhere in Redmond, and put this logic back into an update so we can move on with our lives.