It’s October 30, 2018, 8:07pm… someone emails me a photo in a format I’ve never seen before and I can’t open them.
It’s called HEIC which is a new extension for the High Efficiency Image Format. Even though Apple announced with the release of iOS 11 that it was replacing JPEG files with the HEIC format… it doesn’t necessarily mean it’s easily readable on every Apple device and on any macOS version you may be running.
In my case, I tried opening the files on my MBP running OS X El Capitan – no glory. I had to convert the files and fortunately, there’s a neat web-based converter at https://heictojpg.com. They let you drag drop up to 50 images which then converts them and bundles them up into a single downloadable zip file.
I hear macOS High Sierra can read .heic files natively. If it gains traction and if other platforms begin supporting it natively then this is perhaps the beginning of the end for .jpeg files.
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