Ios11 heic/heif format

So I have been on IOS11 beta and tried for the first time to use my NC install to upload my pics everyday while on vacation. Anyway all worked great and trust in my own cloud is growing thanks to this great product, but I have a question regarding the new file type apple is moving to. While the iOS app seems to be able to view the pics, it seems browser support is lacking and clicking on a file to view it causes a download.
Anyone know if theres a change I need to make or if there will be future support for this format. It supposed to be the way pics are going as they claim ~50% reduction in size while maintaining high quality.

Any info/help would be great and again, thanks for an awesome product!

jpg is old, stable and widely spreaded. Many devices like PC, home entertainment, tablets, OS’s support jpg. That’s the problem for new formats.
Libraries need to be written to support new formats on a wide range of platforms.
Not sure if browsers like firefox, chrome and others will support it in the near future. For sure Safari will do that, unfortunately Safari is Mac OS only.

To answer your question: I am not aware of any action to support Apple’s new format at the moment.

Yes, and additionally in some places, the patent trolls might come out and do what they always do. Heic is heavily patented here is more information on it:

http://jpgtoheif.com/

  • Why (maybe) not use HEIF?

HEIF and HEVC are extensively covered by patents, which means
there could be legal implications to implementing HEIF support,
particularly in paid software or a hardware product.

Hi there,

I guess we will not come around, to support HEIC/HEIF/HEVC-Format, since all Apple devices support it or use it meanwhile. Dropbox supports it already. It shouldn’t be too hard for you guys to support, right?

sounds like something that potentially makes things “really hard”…
Yet I did not study the subject, so I may be wrong…

sounds like something that potentially makes things “really hard”…

Not necessarily hard to implement, but to integrate and distribute without getting into legal trouble. Many Linux distributions don’t ship multimedia related packages out of the box, for example. Here is more on this topic from Debian:

https://www.debian.org/reports/patent-faq

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Thank you for explaining it in a much more clear way than me!!! :slight_smile:

Now that Imagemagick supports it, it’s trivial to support (as a reader in Gallery).

HEVC Advance have made their licenses royalty free for browsers. However, at this time, that policy expires at the end of 2020. Also, I do not know how many of the required patents are covered by the HEVC Advance pool. It sound like (expensive) lawyer work.