iOS 11 has brought a lot of improvements to all the supported iPhones, iPads and iPods. In the midst of all major improvements, one feature that goes unnoticed but deserves a special mention is the native support for HEIC format. You may take this to be another media format that will seldom find relevance in an average iPhone user’s life. But HEIC will, in fact, save all 16GB iPhone models, extending their life by a substantial amount.
HEIC or High Efficiency Image File format as the name suggests is a format to compress images without losing out on quality. Photos that you click on an iPhone with iOS 11 will get saved in HEIC format by default, although you can set it back to JPEG from the camera settings. Some iPhone users are claiming a reduction in space taken by photos up to 50 percent. This should come as a good news for those who use 16GB variants of an iPhone 5S, iPhone SE, iPhone 6 and iPhone 6S.
However, don’t be too excited about the new format. HEIC is a relatively new format documented in 2015 and therefore has limited support in most operating systems. Therefore, if you download a photo directly from an iPhone to a Windows PC or an Android tablet, you might not be able to use the photo, unless you use an HEIC format converter.
We played around with the HEIC format photos and found out that you can get HEIC photos into JPG or PNG formats from your iPhone if :
- Your iPhone is connected to your Windows PC via iTunes.
- Your photos are backed up to cloud and you download them to your PC by clicking on ‘Save image as’ instead of clicking the download button.
Right now, the HEIC format is new to the market and is mostly supported by Apple’s ecosystem and if you have a MacBook, then you have nothing to worry about. If iPhone is the only Apple device you own, then you should be better with image converter software until Microsoft rolls out an update with support for HEIC in Windows 10.
