A short history of the HEIC format
The High Efficiency Image File format, HEIF, was finalised by MPEG in 2015 and published as ISO/IEC 23008-12, built on the same container family as MP4 and designed to hold still images compressed with the HEVC video codec. Apple adopted it on iPhone 7 and later with iOS 11 in 2017, and the .heic extension became the one most people meet.
Before HEIF: JPEG for a quarter century
JPEG, approved as a standard in September 1992, did its job so well that nothing replaced it for decades. Later formats such as JPEG 2000 never became the default on the devices people actually own. Meanwhile video compression kept improving, and a still image compressed with HEVC needs considerably less space than a JPEG of similar quality.
2015: the standard
MPEG finalised HEIF in 2015; it is published as ISO/IEC 23008-12. It is a container, not a codec: it can wrap images compressed with HEVC, AV1 or others, and it can hold several images, thumbnails, depth maps, alpha channels and edit instructions in one file. The container is based on the ISO base media file format that MP4 also uses.
2017: Apple makes it the default
With iOS 11, iPhone 7 and later began saving photos as HEIF with HEVC compression, using the .heic extension, whenever the camera was set to High Efficiency. Apple’s reason, in its own words, is that the formats use less storage while preserving the same visual quality. From then on, new iPhone photos arrived in a format that much software outside Apple’s could not yet open.
The compatibility gap
HEVC is patent-licensed. From the Fall Creators Update of October 2017, new installs of Windows 10 came without an HEVC decoder, and Microsoft moved it to the Microsoft Store, where HEVC Video Extensions is now a paid download. Android gained HEIF decoding in version 8.0. Most web browsers still don’t render HEIC in an image tag. Many upload forms on websites stayed with JPG and PNG. The result is the gap this site exists to bridge: photos that are fine at home and fail everywhere else.
Where it is going
The container is flexible; the problem has always been the codec licence, not the file format. Until decoders are everywhere, JPEG remains the format for sending.
Ask an assistant about this page
Opens in a new tab with this page and the question already filled in.