You maniacs! You blew it up!!

[dreamshark]

I just discovered that somewhere between my old iPhone SE and my spiffy new iPhone 12 Mini, Apple decided to introduce a new image format that nobody ever asked for called High Efficiency Image Format (which of course is abbreviated HEIC in the new file extension because WTF?). I did not realize this until I attempted to copy some pictures I took this summer onto the new Digital Picture Frame I got Richard for Christmas, and the device did not recognize this incomprehensible new format. 

DAMN YOU APPLE!!!!   DAMN YOU ALL TO HELL!

I figured out how to turn this helpful feature off on my iPhone camera for future pictures, but what about the thousands of pictures I've already taken? Do I have to download some dubious looking utility from some sketchy Internet site to convert these pictures? 

Comments

[laramie]

Oh no! Why would they do that? :(

[quadong]

They really did it.

[quadong]

Looks like Imagemagick can work with HEIC files, so there's no need to install anything sketchy.

[dreamshark]

I don't know what ImageMagick is or how you know that it isn't sketchy. And I don't want to "work with HEIC files," just quickly convert a folder of them to JPEG. I did find a free utility called iMazing HEIC Converter that is distributed by the Microsoft Store, so it's probably clean. Anyway, it's as simple as it could possibly be - you just drag any number of files onto the app, choose a destination folder, and blammo!

[quadong]

Oh, I know that Imagemagick is not sketchy because it is an 30-year-old venerable open source project.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ImageMagick

The script to convert a folder of files is probably:

for f in *.heic; do convert $f $(basename $f .heic).jpg; done

Certainly that idea works for all image file formats that I've ever wanted to convert. If you don't want to do it at the commandline, I don't have an easy-baked solution for you, but I imagine that GUIs exist that use Imagemagick underneath.