Today, I had to stop and figure out what HEIC files are because my spouse uses an iPhone. It turns out they’re basically irrelevant other than being a frustrating patent trap.

I’m getting ready to file another Immigration case to make my spouse’s permanent residence, well, permanent.

As part of this next case, they want photos to show that our marriage continues.

Fine, fine. But my spouse sent them in this strange format called HEIC, which is apparently some bizarre iPhone format, that’s technically one of those “MPEG standards”.

As usual, Apple only takes what computers have done for 20 or 30 years and produces some dumbed down and incompatible version.

This one is nastier than JPEG 2000 or even Microsoft’s JPEG-XR, because it’s based on the HEVC codec, which means there’s several thousand patents.

Probably the entire point of pushing this HEIC format on iPhones and making it the default is to try to cause other people to have to pay money (patent royalties) for software that can actually handle the stupid things.

I’m on Fedora and had to go install a package from RPM Fusion called “libheif” which came with a conversion program called heif-convert, which can turn these into standard image files in the JPEG and PNG formats, which is what Walmart accepts when you have photos done at their One Hour Photo department.

There’s not really much use in information transfer formats that don’t actually open when you send them to have something done, and HEIC on an iPhone is the dumbest thing I’ve ever seen in that regard.

Sending photos from your vacation to Walmart to get prints is like, pretty basic, and yet the “amazing iPhone” can’t seem to do what my Kodak EasyShare digital camera from 2003 did, or even my cheap 35 mm cameras in the 1990s where you took them a damned roll of film and walked around the store while they made photos and handed you your negatives back.

In fact, if the iPhone was the only digital camera available, I’d encourage everyone to shout “NYET! The evil stops here!” and go back to film.

Essentially, thanks to Apple, we’re back to the problem that Richard Stallman described in 2000 regarding MP3 or Microsoft Office formats.

People will put the files out there, and then other people who live in the Free World have to figure out some way of dealing with them.

It will be another 11-12 years before HEIC is patent-free, but you don’t have to wait, because AV1F exists now and is more efficient, and is royalty-free.

Unfortunately, Walmart doesn’t accept AV1F either.

So we’re back to JPEG/PNG for mass compatibility, and that’s unlikely to change for some time. The upside is that if people start using AV1F, then Free and Open Source Software operating systems can come with programs that can read the data and then forward it into another file format without making the user jump through hoops.

Also, at least some day we may have something to point at when people ask why we’re using the JPEG format from 1992 and what to use instead. By definition, that will never happen with an MPEG or Microsoft “standard” because they want money, and JPEG is “good enough” and nobody can sue over it anymore because it’s 30 years old, and tragically, software patents in the United States have caused it to become the de facto image format, forever apparently.

I mean, I was opening JPEGs in the 90s on a 486 PC.

I think it’s funny, in a way, that Apple inflicted HEIC on their customers.

If they try to upload their family photos to be printed, it won’t work any better for them in that format than it did for me, and they too will have to figure out some way of turning them into a standard file. So it creates a headache for their own customers.

It really does make you wonder if there actually was a problem that Apple was trying to solve with HEIC, because it’s still a lossy format, which means that to get those small file sizes, it discards image data that it thinks you won’t perceive, but this means that converting it to anything except PNG lossless introduces another generation of loss.

So the best you’ll manage to do is create these enormous PNG files to back up to “future-proof” your iPhone photos and make sure they don’t get any worse than they are today, which is ridiculous.

Cell phone cameras should allow “Save in PNG” format, but it seems that many, hell, maybe even most don’t.

But with my Android phone, at least when it saves to JPEG, it doesn’t HAVE to get worse than that somehow later on when I want to *gasp* print my photos out.

Score another one for Android.