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So, here’s the thing. I have a new iPhone and an old Mac. iOS 11 (still in beta as of today) and El Capitan (no more updates for this Mac). I use iCloud photo library in both devices. When I take a photo in the new format with my iPhone 7, is there any way to use it right away in my mac, without having to convert it in my iPhone first? I mean, can I get those photos synced through iCloud and converted locally on my Mac?

I have tried to find a third party software that could do that kind of conversion, but was not able to find any that would work on El Capitan. Any idea?

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  • You should be able to convert HEIF photos on export. Have you tried that? – Allan Sep 1 '17 at 17:27
  • I am still trying to understand the mechanics of it. I have set it to Automatic in the iPhone. But I got a couple heic files in Photos app through iCloud Photo Library sync and also when downloading from iCloud website. I guess the website shout allow us to export a JPEG. And it would be nice to have the same in Photos app, in El Capitan. – Victor Domingos Sep 1 '17 at 17:31
  • I would like to start using the new format in order to save space, but still have some way to access my photos from my current Mac. – Victor Domingos Sep 1 '17 at 17:32
  • Well... Now I was able to download a JPG version of a HEIC photo from iCloud website. Not sure if I changed something in my settings since the last time I tried. But Photos app still reports the synced file (not the one I downloaded) as a .HEIC. And if I try to export it, it does not work. Only JPGs get exported. Which is weird, because the photo gets displayed normally in the photos app. – Victor Domingos Sep 1 '17 at 18:11
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    @Mark yeah, that was one of my first thoughts, but it seems that their HEIC conversion is a feature that only works in a more recent OS. – Victor Domingos Sep 1 '17 at 18:16
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We just released this little free app for macOS: https://imazing.com/heic

Minimum macOS version is 10.8, so no worries with El Capitan. : )

enter image description here

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    This tool also preserves EXIF data too, which is awesome! – Eric Majerus Mar 8 '18 at 23:34
  • Not working recently – ɹoƃı Jul 4 '18 at 10:08
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You can use the command line tool imagemagick to convert HEIC images to JPG.

# install imagemagick
brew install imagemagick

# convert a single image
magick convert foo.HEIC foo.jpg

# bulk convert multiple images
magick mogrify -monitor -format jpg *.HEIC
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    What does "convert: no decode delegate for this image format `HEIC" mean? – gap Mar 9 at 22:16
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    @gap, you error message means you don't have the right stuff installed to deal with the HEIC format. brew upgrade imagemagick solved this problem for me. – kuzzooroo Apr 19 at 19:11
  • @gap Not sure. My original install command had an extra option: brew install imagemagick --with-libheif, but others said it wasn't needed anymore. You could give that a try. Maybe it makes a difference depending on your OSX version. – wisbucky Apr 24 at 18:04
  • @wisbucky, regarding my non-deleted answer: you were right. not sure what was going on before. Thanks for the feedback. 👍 – Kirby May 13 at 23:05
5

I found Dropbox to be a good conversion tool, as it does it transparently for the usage on any operating system and platform.

When you do the shot from iPhone, Dropbox automatically converts .heic image to .jpg when uploading it to computer (controlled by the settings). Since I'm using both Windows OS and MacOS, there's no need to install separate additional applications.

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Below an online (web browser) conversion tool: doesn’t support batch processing but it will work on a wide range of systems, including non-Apple OSs.

http://heictojpg.com/

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    This website now lets you upload up to 50 images at once. – kuzzooroo Apr 19 at 19:11
2

An excellent command line tool that works very well is tifig. It can be easily compiled on multiple platforms. It should compile on any platform with a relatively modern development toolchain, that should include El Capitan!

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  • I followed the instructions in the repo to install tifig using brew install cmake vips ffmpeg (from the repo) but it doesn't seem to work (tifig command not found). – Amelio Vazquez-Reina Oct 8 '18 at 21:28
  • I don't know if you did or not, but you have to follow the build instructions as well. To execute inside build folder after build, just run ./tifig -v -p file.heic file.jpg – kentrh Dec 13 '18 at 17:41

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